What it is
A concept is the code and name your accountant uses to identify each line of the daily close sheet: 001 RENTA HABITACION (room revenue), 020 CONSUMO RESTAURANTE CARGO HAB. (restaurant charged to the room), 080 PAGO EFECTIVO (cash payment). It is the language of the sheet your night auditor signs, and it is also the bridge to the books: each concept points to an account, and that is where the daily journal entry, the póliza, comes from.
Besides its code and name, every concept has:
- A group with its side. Debits (room revenue, food and beverage, miscellaneous, tips) and credits (cash, bank cards, deposits).
- A rule: what it hooks onto. Room revenue for the night, a folio charge of a given category, a payment with a given method, or tips. The rule decides which movements land on that line.
- A revenue center, when needed. It splits two lines that share a category, for example restaurant and pool bar consumption.
Concepts belong to the organization, not to each property: if your group runs several hotels, they all use the same codes.
Why it exists
Because a hotel coming from another system already has its codes, and its accountant knows them by heart. Containn doesn't force its own on them: it proposes a classic structure and the accountant rewrites it. And because without a stable code there would be no way to say, once, which account each line goes to.
Step by step
- Go to Settings → Accounting concepts. You can also get there from Containn → Configuración (Settings) → Conceptos contables y auditoría nocturna (accounting concepts and night audit).
- If the screen is empty, click Create the proposal: it creates 20 concepts in 7 groups, with sample codes.
- Type your own code and name over them, and save each row with the disk icon.
- For anything the proposal doesn't cover, use New concept inside the right group.
- Switch off the concepts you don't use: they stop appearing on the sheet, but they aren't deleted and closes already issued still mention them.
- Give each concept an account: How to map your codes to your accounts.
You need the Conceptos contables (accounting concepts) permission in My Team.
What can go wrong
- A movement with no concept. If no rule picks it up, the sheet shows it without a code, under the system label (for example, “Cargo · early_departure”), and that day's journal entry won't come out until it has an account. This happens with early departure, which the proposal doesn't include: see Folio charge categories.
- Two concepts with the same rule. If two of them hook onto the same thing at the same revenue center, only one gets the movements.
- Switching off a concept that still gets movements. Those movements are left without a concept and hold up the day's journal entry.
- Changing a code doesn't rewrite the past. Signed sheets keep the code and name they were signed with.