STAYLEDGERHotels, reconciled

Hotels file GST too. Almost nobody reconciles it.

A corporate room night carries GST at 12 or 18 per cent, two to three times the rate on a domestic air ticket, and room nights usually outnumber flight sectors across a travel programme. Every stay issues a tax invoice, and in most organisations nobody is responsible for collecting them. StayLedger applies the airline method to accommodation.

The gap

Hotels file GST too. Almost nobody reconciles it.

Corporate accommodation attracts GST at 12 or 18 per cent depending on tariff, materially more than the roughly 5 per cent on a domestic air ticket. Every stay issues a tax invoice. In most companies, no function owns collecting them.

01

The document never arrives by itself

Airline invoices at least sit in known portals. Hotel paper scatters across chain billing systems, front desks, booking inboxes and traveller phones. Collection is the whole battle, so the battle rarely starts.

02

Each stay is small enough to ignore

A nine hundred rupee GST line on a two night stay clears nobody's threshold. Multiplied across every traveller and every month, it becomes a number that belongs in a review.

03

Nobody owns it

Travel desks book, finance files, admin holds the folios. Hotel GST sits precisely in the gap between three teams, which is why it needs an outside owner rather than another internal instruction.

The night audit

A month of stays, brought to book.

Twenty-four room nights across chains, independents and booking channels, which is a normal spread for a mid-sized programme. Each issues its own document in its own place. Watch them become one register.

One month · 24 stays · illustrative Auditing

One GST register. Every stay's tax data extracted and reconciled, in the same format your airline data arrives in.

0documents captured
No single stay is large enough to chase on its own. The audit does not chase; it collects all of them, every month.
The paper trail

Hotel documentation comes in three shapes.

Each booking channel leaves a different document in a different place, which is half the reason the category goes unreconciled.

01

Chain central billing

Marriott, Taj, ITC, Radisson and their peers bill corporate stays centrally and issue e-invoices from their own systems. Retrievable, provided somebody owns the account and goes looking.

02

Property level invoices

Independents and franchise properties invoice at the front desk. This is the folio your traveller photographed, or did not. The most scattered shape and the most commonly lost.

03

Aggregator and TMC paper

Bookings made through platforms produce their own documentation layer, sometimes the hotel's invoice and sometimes the platform's. Knowing which one is claimable is the skill.

One stay, traced

Where a single stay's invoice ends up.

Booking is well controlled in most organisations. Documentation is not. One stay's tax invoice can land in four places, and two of them put it permanently beyond finance.

Two nights · Mumbai · booked through the TMC Checked in
The stay happens 2 nights · ₹18,400 room charge · ₹2,208 GST
AFolio at checkoutPrinted, pocketed, expensed as a photograph. The tax invoice never becomes data.-
BEmailed to the travellerSits in a personal inbox. Finance never sees the GSTIN or the tax split.-
CChain central billingCorrect and retrievable, provided somebody owns the account and goes looking.-
DVia the TMC or platformPlatform paper, hotel paper, or both. Knowing which is claimable is the skill.-

StayLedger's job is to make all four paths end in the same place: the document found, its GST extracted, the stay reconciled and claimable.

₹0claimed, from one stay
Two of four paths lose the document by default. That is not a process failure; it is how hotel billing is designed.
What StayLedger does

The airline discipline, applied to room nights.

The same four moves, the same register format, the same monthly rhythm. Nothing new for your team to learn.

01

Documents gathered

Hotel e-documentation collected from wherever your stays leave it. You share what you hold; we pursue the rest, including chain accounts that require a written authorisation.

02

GST data extracted

Every tax field lifted into the same purchase-register Excel your airline data arrives in. One format and one workflow across both ledgers.

03

Reconciled and reported

Matched against the government's record, with gaps identified and valued, so hotel input tax credit stops being a rounding decision and becomes a claimed number.

04

Priced per document

Twenty five rupees per hotel document processed. No platform fee, no minimum volume and no separate charge for reconciliation.

Questions

What people ask before starting.

The honest answers, before you commit anything.

01

Our travellers expense hotels personally. Does that break it?

No, and it is the most common setup we see. What matters is whether the tax invoice is raised to your company's name and GSTIN rather than the individual's. Part of the review establishes how often that is happening, because where it is not, the credit was never claimable and a small booking instruction fixes future stays.

02

Can we run hotels without airlines?

Yes. StayLedger runs standalone. Most clients arrive through airline work and add hotels once the rhythm is established, but there is no dependency in either direction.

03

What about international stays?

Foreign hotel stays generally do not generate Indian GST credit, so there is no Indian tax to reclaim. StayLedger focuses on domestic room nights, which is where the claimable position sits.

04

Is there a free tier as there is on airlines?

Not as a standing offer, because hotel data varies far more between companies. The honest equivalent is a scoped review of one quarter of stays, which sizes the position before you commit.

Start where nobody has looked.

A free review of one quarter of stays, across your chains, cities and channels, with a first read on what is sitting unclaimed.