Checking hotel e-invoices before sending: a review checklist

A hotel e-invoice review is a short human check of the document before it leaves for the tax administration's platform: buyer title and tax or identity number, address, a line-by-line match to the folio, the company and personal split, package and deposit handling, the foreign-currency rate your accountant specifies, and a named approver whose approval is recorded.

A guest checks out at 06:40. The folio carries a company-paid room, a minibar line and a spa charge, and the software has the invoice ready in seconds. The only moment when a wrong buyer title or a missing split costs a keystroke rather than a correction process is the one before someone presses send. This article gives you a reviewer's routine for that moment: what to check, in what order, and how to record the decision.

Why review an e-invoice before it is sent?#

Because the document leaves your building the moment the integrator sends it, and after that the fix is a correction handled by your accountant, not an edit at the desk.

Start with what the document is. e-Fatura is not a new kind of invoice: GİB describes it as an electronic document, in a format it sets, carrying the information the Tax Procedure Law requires, travelling between seller and buyer through a central GİB platform, with the same legal qualities as paper (GİB, eBelge, e-Fatura Hakkında (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01). e-Arşiv covers sales to taxpayers not registered for e-Fatura and to people who are not taxpayers at all, and the document is delivered on paper or electronically as the buyer requests (GİB, eBelge, e-Arşiv Hakkında (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01). If the distinction is new to you, we cover it in more detail in e-Fatura versus e-Arşiv for guests and agencies.

Software prepares the document from data. The review checks the inputs software cannot know: who is actually paying, which lines belong to the company, which rate the accountant wants. The cost of an error grows with time. Caught before sending, it is a field change. Caught after, it is a correction, a call to the payer's finance team and a reconciliation.

Be clear about the status of this practice. The review is good practice, not a legal duty; the legal duties concern the document's content and its transmission. Place the review between two fixed points: the folio is closed, and the integrator has not yet sent. Everything in this checklist happens inside that window. For the wider picture of what every stay involves, see the four steps of every stay in Türkiye.

What must the buyer block of a hotel invoice contain?#

At minimum the buyer's name or trade title, address, and tax office and number if there is one; for a guest who is not a taxpayer, the identity details your accountant tells you to use.

The Tax Procedure Law requires the buyer's name, trade title, address and, if any, tax office and number, alongside the date, series and sequence number, the issuer's details and the type, quantity, price and amount of the goods or work (Vergi Usul Kanunu, Law No. 213, consolidated text (opens in a new tab), Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 2026-11-01). For a company buyer, use the trade title as registered, not the brand on the signage. A shortened or reworded title is a frequent reason a payer's finance team sends a document back.

The tax number, the tax office and the invoicing address come from the payer's own record. Ask for them once and store them, rather than retyping them at every checkout. When an agency or a company books and pays, the buyer is the payer, not the person sleeping in the room; the guest's name belongs in the folio, not automatically in the buyer block. For an individual guest with no tax number, what goes in the buyer field is a question for your accountant. Do not let the desk improvise a rule.

Also check for silent damage: a tax number that lost a digit, a leading zero added by a spreadsheet, a title truncated by a field limit.

How do you match the invoice to the folio, line by line?#

Put the closed folio and the prepared invoice side by side and read them in three passes: nights, outlet charges, then payments. Stop at the first line you cannot explain.

Close the folio first. A review against a folio that can still change is not a review, it is a rehearsal.

Pass one, nights. The number of room nights on the invoice must equal the nights between arrival and departure, and each night's rate must match what was confirmed to the guest or the company.

Pass two, outlet charges. Restaurant, bar, minibar, spa, telephone and late checkout, each with its date. A charge posted after the folio closed needs its own document, not a line added to this one. How outlet charges and fiscal devices meet the invoice is its own topic, covered in how outlet charges and fiscal devices meet at the invoice.

Pass three, payments and deposits. Every payment taken must appear as a payment against the folio, so the balance on the invoice is the balance the guest sees. Look for corrections that were applied wrongly: a voided charge should appear as a void and a new line, never as a line that quietly disappeared. Check the totals last, not first. A total that matches a wrong set of lines is the most convincing kind of error.

How do you split company and personal charges on one stay?#

Decide per line, not per folio: the room may sit with the company while the minibar sits with the guest, and each side needs its own document with its own buyer block.

Get the split agreed before checkout, in writing: a note on the reservation, a clause in the company contract, or the guest's signature at the desk. Split by line, never by percentage. A percentage split produces two documents nobody can reconcile against the folio.

Typical company lines are the room, breakfast where the contract includes it, and agreed extras such as a meeting room or a transfer. Typical personal lines are minibar, bar, spa, telephone and extra nights. Two documents mean two buyer blocks and two send events; send them together so the payer sees the whole stay at once. When an agency pays for the room and the guest pays for extras, the split is agency versus guest, and the agency document follows the agency's contracted terms.

Record who decided the split and when. The decision, not just the result, is what you will need if the payer disputes the invoice weeks later.

Which exchange rate applies to a foreign-currency invoice?#

The rate your accountant specifies. Central-bank rates are published daily, so a rate quoted at 14:00 is the same rate all day, and the desk should never invent one.

Central-bank indicative rates are daily, not hourly. If someone at the desk quotes an hourly rate, the number is wrong before the document is even prepared. Which rate applies, buying or selling, and which day's rate, is a tax question. Confirm it with your accountant; this article does not decide it.

Write the rate, its date and its source on the review record, so the accountant can check the arithmetic without reopening the folio. Packages need the same discipline: how a package price is divided across its components for tax purposes is your accountant's decision, not a split improvised at checkout. A deposit taken weeks earlier is a payment, not an invoice; check that it appears against the folio once, at the rate and date your accountant has set for it. If the folio currency and the invoice currency differ, note the conversion on the record. An unexplained difference between the two is the first thing an auditor asks about.

Who approves the invoice, and how is the approval recorded?#

One named role per shift approves, and the approval is written down with the document: who approved, when, and what they checked.

Name the approver as a role in the procedure, not as one reliable person's habit. A procedure that depends on who is on shift is not a control. The approval happens before the send; an approval collected afterwards records history, not a decision. Why the send is treated as irreversible is worth understanding on its own, and we cover it in why a sent invoice is an irreversible action.

Use a second approver for unusual documents: a re-issued invoice, a changed buyer, a package, a large correction. Treat the send as irreversible. Once the document has gone to the guest or the payer, the desk cannot pull it back, and that is the point where a small error becomes a process.

Keep the record with the document. The Tax Procedure Law requires those who must keep books to retain their books and documents for five years from the calendar year after the year they relate to (Vergi Usul Kanunu, Law No. 213, consolidated text (opens in a new tab), Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 2026-11-01).

In the AI Otel hotel operating system, e-invoices are designed to wait for a person's review before sending. The compliance layer, including KBS, KVKK, e-Fatura and e-Arşiv, is Built, ahead of launch.

After a mistake, what should the hotel do first?#

Stop sending, write down exactly what happened, and call your accountant before issuing anything else against the same folio.

Stop first. Sending a second document to cancel out the first, without advice, usually creates a third problem. Record what happened while it is fresh: which document, which field, when it was sent, who saw it and what the payer has already been told.

Let the accountant decide whether a correction, an objection or a cancellation is the right route. Those procedures belong to your adviser, not to the front desk. Tell the payer early if the buyer block is wrong, because their finance team may already be posting the document.

Fix the cause, not only the document. Ask whether the failure was in the buyer master data, the split decision or the rate, and change that input. Never delete the evidence. A correction that is recorded and explained is worth more than a tidy history that cannot be reconstructed.

What to do next#

Build the review as a fixed window with a fixed record: folio closed, invoice checked in three passes, split decided per line, rate taken from your accountant, approval written down, then send. Start with one shift and one approver, run it for a week, and you will see which of the errors you catch come from the buyer master data and which come from decisions nobody had written down. If you want to see how a system can hold the document for review instead of sending it, request a briefing at ai-otel.com/contact.