One cancellation, three ways to book it

A guest cancels. On your PMS it is one status change. On the OTAs' money screens it is three different things, depending on which OTA the booking came from. All three are correct, and treating them alike is how cancellations end up wrong in a spreadsheet.

Three OTAs, three records

• Agoda keeps the booking on its statement with a value of zero. The row is there; there is simply nothing in it.
• Goibibo / MakeMyTrip settles the booking first and reverses it afterwards. The reversal arrives as a credit memo for the full amount that was payable — so a cancelled booking can show a payable figure that is not actually owed.
• Booking.com keeps the reservation on its monthly statement at zero commission. It is billed, at nothing.

If you flatten all three into "cancelled, 0", you lose the one record that shows money moving and coming back — the settlement and its reversal on Goibibo / MakeMyTrip.

The same booking number twice is not always a duplicate

On a ledger, a booking that was paid and then cancelled can appear as a pair of rows with the same booking number: one for the amount paid, one for the same amount taken back.

To anyone tidying a spreadsheet, that looks like a duplicate. Delete one row and the pair no longer cancels out — you have either invented money the OTA never paid or erased a refund it really made. On one ledger we read, removing "duplicates" this way created money that had never been paid.

The way to tell a pair from a true duplicate is the sign. A duplicate repeats the same amount; a reversal repeats it negated.

Where the reversal sits

A reversal doesn't always land in the same period as the booking. A cancellation in one month can be taken back from a later payout, with nothing on that payout naming the original stay. If you reconcile month by month, the earlier month looks overpaid and the later one short — and both are right.

A ledger that adds up can still look wrong

Because a reversal pair nets to zero, the OTA's total for the period is correct even when individual rows look strange: a payout of zero against a booking with a value, or a negative amount "owed to" the OTA beside a blank payout. Check totals per booking number, not row by row, and the strangeness resolves.

A short checklist

• Keep every row the OTA shows. Never remove a "duplicate" without checking whether its amount is the same amount negated.
• Add up per booking, then compare — not row against row.
• On Goibibo / MakeMyTrip, a cancelled booking's payable is only owed if no credit memo cancels it.
• Expect cancellations to settle in a later period than they happened.