About the GoBD

The German acronym GoBD stands for "principles for the proper management and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form, as well as data access".
The GoBD principles apply to all areas in which operational processes are recorded by means of digital processing techniques. This includes, for example payment systems. They apply to all tax relevant documents that are digitally recorded, used or archived. Every business transaction needs to be documented with a receipt. Each German taxpayer is responsible for the compliance.

GoBD Core principles

According to the GoBD, the documents and bookings need to fulfil the following core requirements:

#	GoBD	Little Hotelier
1	Traceability Every booking must be documented. Business transactions need to be documented progressively and in retrograde: from the receipt to the tax declaration and the other way round. The accounting must be comprehensible to a knowledgeable third party within a reasonable period of time, such that this party can obtain an overview of the business transactions and bookkeeping systems. In order to understand books and records, it is necessary to create informative and complete process documentation; the same applies to work instructions and their implementation.	Every booking in the LH system is clearly documented and recorded. All reservations are displayed on either the Calendar, or in the Reservations section of the system. Cancelled Reservations are not removed from the system but updated to a “Cancelled” status Reservations are unable to be deleted from the system by users or internal team members. Reservations include payment processing, discounts, and refunds which are all tracked in the LH system. Users may easily add additional transactions processed outside of the system in order to have complete transaction records. The General Ledger section of LH gives comprehensible reservations and corresponding transactional information to a knowledgeable third party. Process documentation can be found here to be consumed by any third party (Ex. Auditors). Documentation includes complete walkthrough of the system, and supported general ledger functionality.
2	Completeness Full and gap-free documentation of individual business transactions. Secure storage, protection against loss. Technical and organisational controls (e.g. recoding and plausibility checks, analyses for gaps or repeat items).	All reservations created within Little Hotelier are recorded and cannot be deleted providing the full gap free documentation. Little Hotelier uses state of the art cloud based technology hosted on AWS which provides scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure. If an exception in data occurs, which requires the underlying data of Little Hotelier to be altered, the only function that is able to perform that is the database administrator. Every alteration made by a database administrator is clearly logged with the user ID of the person who performed the alteration, data time and business & technical reason/sign-off
3	Accuracy Business transactions must be substantiated by supporting documents. Presentation based on accounting standards- It must be possible to track business transactions from origin to processing – authentically and seamlessly.	Reservation and fiscal transactions data is recorded and tracked from the time of creation. Any and all modifications to this data are also recorded real time. Little Hotelier maintains a unified data model across the application, data storage and archiving systems. This allows the system to maintain data integrity, traceability and security across the board.
4	Timely bookings and recording Business transactions must be recorded promptly after they occur. Recording of non-cash bookings within ten days. Daily recording of cash receipts and cash expenditures. Recording of periodic bookings by the end of the following month.	Little Hotelier provides the capability for property users to record all transactions. Due to the cloud based nature of LH all reservations and transactions are immediately stored upon users recording this information. However, it is the users' responsibility to log all cash and non-cash transactions into the system if not using an integrated payment gateway.
5	Order All bookings must be clear, distinct, orderly and comprehensible. They must be immediately legible and presented individually and objectively ordered according to the proper accounts.	Little Hotelier has a General Ledger section that enables users to clearly visualise bookings and transactions per booking: The transaction processing system is automatically closed by the Little Hotelier system at midnight every day of the Hotelier’s local timezone. Fiscal closings are grouped at an annual, monthly and daily level. The closing data clearly summarises all the transactions that have taken place during the respective closing periods. Invoices pertaining to a reservation are also generated in a sequential order, enabling a trail or history of events. The general ledger interface provides search capabilities to instantly find the details of bookings.
6	Immutability A booking must not be modified in such a way that the original content is no longer detectable. Changes and deletions from and to electronic bookings must be recorded.	Every transaction made within Little Hotelier is stored in an immutable data source, which cannot be altered by the customers. The customers have no point of entry to alter data, other than in a way where a new record for any alteration is created. A snapshot of the reservation data is taken for every modification made and stored to track all changes
7	Retention German tax laws further require that all (electronic and paper-based) accounting records are stored in Germany, all bookkeeping entries are performed in Germany and the associated IT systems are located in Germany. All original receipts must be retained on German territory for 10 years.	Every transaction made within Little Hotelier for every reservation is stored in an immutable data source, with archiving functions built in. Once this data has been stored, it can be retrieved at any time by using the “General Ledger” functionality to view a breakdown of the transactions made. In addition to archiving transaction level data, Little Hotelier also archives all cumulative and perpetual closings data. Archived data is never purged and hence is available for the lifetime of a customer's system usage.

The General Ledger

To ensure compliance with the GoBD's core principles, the Little Hotelier Front Desk has a General Ledger functionality.

The General Ledger tracks the fiscal transactions of a property and enables users to clearly visualise bookings and transactions per booking.
It gives comprehensible reservations and corresponding transactional information to a knowledgeable third party.

Process documentation can be found in the Little Hotelier Front Desk - General Ledger User Manual to be consumed by any third party (Ex. Auditors). Documentation includes complete walkthrough of the system, and supported general ledger functionality.

Using the General Ledger

Little Hotelier Payments, our integrated payment solution - manage your transactions

Little Hotelier Payments, our integrated payment solution - process or record a payment

Manage your direct booking reservations from SiteMinder's direct booking engine

Getting started with the General Ledger