Get your totals right before your first booking
Taxes decide whether the number your guest pays matches the number you expected. Set them up before you take bookings — the arithmetic is applied when a booking is made, so fixing it later means editing reservations one at a time. This section also covers ad-hoc fees and why OTA bookings are taxed differently on purpose.
Front Desk Settings → Tax Management. There is a master switch to enable taxes for the property, then each individual tax has its own on/off toggle.
The master switch is useful when you are still setting up: leave it off while you enter your taxes, turn it on when they are all correct. Nothing is applied to bookings until it is on.
Inclusive means the tax is already inside the price you typed. Exclusive means it gets added on top. Same tax rate, very different total — and this is the single most common setup mistake in any PMS.
Take a room you entered as 100, with a 13% tax:
| Guest pays | You keep | Tax | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inclusive — tax already inside your 100 | 100.00 | 88.50 | 11.50 |
| Exclusive — tax added on top | 113.00 | 100.00 | 13.00 |
Which one you want depends on where you are and how you quote:
Set it per tax, so you can mix the two if that is how your market works.
Add a tax and give it four things: a name, a type, a value, and whether it is already inside your prices.
There is also a display order, which decides the sequence taxes are applied in. That matters as soon as one tax is calculated on top of another.
Use Percentage for sales taxes like IVA or VAT. Use Fixed Amount for per-person or per-night levies, which most city and tourism taxes are.
Yes. A tax can apply to the room rate alone, or to the room rate plus taxes already added — and display order decides which taxes came first.
Some jurisdictions genuinely require this: a service charge is added to the room, then sales tax is charged on the room and the service charge. If your local rules work that way, order your taxes so the service charge sits above the sales tax.
If your taxes are independent of each other — which is the common case — leave each applying to the room rate only and the order will not change your totals.
Here is a common Latin American setup: IVA at 13%, added on top, plus a fixed tourism tax of $2 per night, on a 3-night stay at $100 a night.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Room — 3 nights at $100 | $300.00 |
| IVA 13% on the room | $39.00 |
| Tourism tax — $2 × 3 nights | $6.00 |
| Guest pays | $345.00 |
| Your revenue | $300.00 |
Now the same stay with IVA inclusive instead — your $100 already contains it:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Room — 3 nights at $100 | $300.00 |
| of which IVA 13% | $34.51 |
| Tourism tax — $2 × 3 nights | $6.00 |
| Guest pays | $306.00 |
| Your revenue | $265.49 |
Same rate on screen, $39 difference in what you take home. Worth getting right.
Open the booking and use Add Extra under Extra Services & Adjustments. It puts an ad-hoc line on that booking only.
This is for the things that come up on the day:
Each one gets a description and an amount, and you decide whether tax applies.
Because they do two different jobs, and unfortunately they are named alike.
| Extra Services & Adjustments on a booking | Extra Services in Settings | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A one-off charge on this booking | A catalogue of things you sell |
| Who adds it | You, at the front desk | The guest, while booking online |
| Applies to | That reservation only | Every booking on your site |
| Example | "Late checkout, $25" | "Airport transfer, $30 per person" |
So: if you want to sell airport transfers to every guest, build it once in Front Desk Settings → Extra Services. If you want to charge this guest for something that happened, use Add Extra on their booking.
Mark a fee taxable and your property taxes apply to it. Leave it non-taxable and it goes on the bill as-is.
The general shape, though local rules win:
If your accountant has told you which side something falls on, follow that. Otherwise taxable is the safer default for anything the guest chose to buy.
Because bookings from Booking.com and Expedia arrive with the OTA's own tax breakdown, and Amiqa deliberately does not apply your property tax rules on top of them. Applying both would tax the guest twice.
The OTA already calculated and displayed tax when the guest booked. That is the number the guest agreed to pay, so that is the number Amiqa keeps.
On the payment page for an OTA booking you will see a proper per-room breakdown — subtotal, tax, total — and any tax that was already inside the price is marked with a green Tax Included chip so you can tell at a glance which lines were added on top and which were baked in.
Your own tax settings still govern everything else: direct bookings, walk-ins, phone reservations, and anything through your own booking site.
Edit it to change the rate, or use its toggle to switch it off. Changes apply to new bookings from that moment on.
Disable rather than delete anything you have already used. A disabled tax stops applying to new bookings but stays attached to the ones that already have it, so last month's totals still add up and your reports stay honest. Deleting it can leave historical bookings referencing something that no longer exists.
The only tax worth deleting is one you created by mistake and never used.
Tax editing is its own permission, separate from rooms and rates. That is deliberate — taxes affect every booking and your reporting, so they usually sit with whoever owns the property or handles the accounts.
If you can see Tax Management but cannot save changes, you have read access without update access. Ask the property owner to grant tax permission.