Hotel pre-stay deposit charge

[lemster9]

I was charged by the hotel with an arbitrary amount as a deposit before I stayed, so this is a separate charge on my expense report.  My company does not have a category for such a deposit.  If I select lodging, the amount will does equal any of the other charges on the final hotel bill, so I can't just leave one of those charges off.  How should I categorize this fee?

On the final hotel bill, I must itemize all of the actual room charges and taxes, so the final amount itemized exceeds the payment by the original deposit charge.  I tried adding a negative amount equal to the deposit, but this is not accepted. 

I tried to categorize the deposit both as a general lodging amount as well as a miscellaneous amount and then categorize the negative amount on the final hotel charge accordingly, but this didn't help.  Any ideas? 

[KevinD]

@lemster9 looks like you figured this out. Correct? Could you post what you did to resolve the issue as this might help someone else in the future. 🙂

[lemster9 · Accepted solution]

I found a coworker that suggested I itemize the deposit as lodging and include a screen shot of the credit card charge as the receipt.  For the final hotel charge it got interesting.  I took the remaining room balance, subtracted the deposit and then divided that by the number of nights as the nightly charge.  There is a check box that allows you to not break apart the room and taxes, so in the end this worked. 

I never would have figured this out because the basic instructions and travel policy specifically cites accurate itemization of the taxes.  What's worse was that each night (4 total) was a different rate due to various reasons. 

I hope this helps for others.

[mfabiano]

Sorry Kevin but this isn't accurate or correct, to be documenting expenses this way. There is no field for a pre-deposit. That's the root cause.  SAP really can't add this? It's an old issue. We shouldn't be doing work arounds for common expense items.

[pbbarley]

So how do we pay the 2 claims, I have the exact same issue.  I stayed at a hotel for 3 nights total of 420 euros but the hotel billed me 1 euro for a holding deposit and 419 euros for the main stay but I cant add the 1 euro onto the 419 bill