📽️ Video: How to split a booking

Every property manager eventually runs into a booking that spans two calendar months, and needs to show up correctly on both months' owner and management statements. Clearing's Split Booking feature solves this by dividing a single booking's financials into two (or more) separate bookings, prorated by the number of nights that fall into each month.

This article walks through how to split a booking, and how to set up Split Settings so Clearing flags this automatically going forward.

Head to the Bookings page and open the reservation you want to split.

From the booking detail page, click Split in the top toolbar.

Clearing will prompt you to choose how the split should be structured. Select Split by Month to prorate the booking's financials based on the number of nights that fall in each calendar month.

You can also choose Add a new split to divide the booking on custom dates instead of by calendar month.

You'll also choose whether the split should be based on Arrival or Departure. If your account recognizes revenue on departure, use departure here too, so the split lines up with the rest of your reporting.

Check the box next to each financial line you want prorated across the split. In our example, we split the accommodation fare and the host fee, since both should be recognized based on the nights stayed in each month.

A quick note on cleaning fees: if you leave the cleaning fee unchecked, Clearing defaults to recognizing the full cleaning fee in the first split. Most managers instead check the box to move the cleaning fee to the last split, so it lines up with the month the clean actually happens, at checkout.

Check the box next to "Check this box if you want to manually add your financial split amounts, with categories and accounting option" if you'd rather set the split amounts and categories yourself instead of prorating by nights.

Once everything looks right, click Confirm Split. Clearing creates separate bookings on your Bookings page, one per month the original reservation touched.

After confirming, your original booking is replaced by its split bookings. If you're using filters (like a minimum nights threshold), you may need to adjust them to see the new, shorter bookings. You can also check the Split bookings box on the Bookings page to filter down to just your split bookings.

Once created, split bookings work exactly like normal bookings. Open either one to view or adjust its financials, for example, increasing the accommodation fare on one month and decreasing it on the other.

One important guardrail: however you adjust the splits, the total across all of them still needs to tie out to the actual cash received and the total expected payout. Clearing's reconciliation checks the combined total across all splits, not each split individually. So if you're expecting $1,100 total, that's still what the system looks for across the full set of splits, even if the guest paid in more than one installment.

Changed your mind? Open the split booking and use the Cancel Split option in the top-left corner. Confirm the cancellation, and Clearing undoes the split and restores the original, single booking.

If you're splitting bookings regularly, you don't have to configure each one from scratch. From the Bookings page, open Split Settings to set your defaults:

Bookings that meet your flagging criteria show up for review, so you can confirm and apply the split using your saved defaults instead of building it out manually each time.

Have questions about splitting bookings or setting up your Split Settings? Reach out anytime through the messaging center in the bottom right of Clearing, we're happy to help!