Understanding the "Booking-level deduction" column in the SmilyPay Payouts export

What it is

Booking-level deduction is a column in the SmilyPay Payouts export that shows how much of a payout row was held back to absorb bookings that came out negative.

You'll find it between Balance and Additional data. On most rows it shows €0.00 — it only carries a value in one specific situation, described below.

Why a payout row can pay out less than its Balance

Sometimes a channel sends a payout in which one or more reservations come out negative — typically a cancellation or refund landing after that booking had already been paid out. The booking now owes money back, but there are no funds left on it to take.

When that happens, the channel doesn't invoice you separately. It sends one net transfer, and the negative amount is absorbed by other lines in the same payout — usually the account-level lines that aren't attached to any booking, such as commission adjustments.

The result is a row whose Balance is, say, €45.00 while its Account payout amount is €0.00. The Booking-level deduction column names the missing €45.00, so each row reads as a subtraction you can verify at a glance.

How it works — a worked example

A payout contains one cancelled reservation at −€50.00 and two commission adjustments of €20.00 and €45.00. The channel transfers €15.00.

There is €60.00 to absorb: the €50.00 the booking owes back, plus a €10.00 traveller fee that booking still owed and no longer had funds to cover. The larger adjustment absorbs €45.00 and pays out nothing; the smaller one absorbs the remaining €15.00 and pays out €5.00.

Each account row now reconciles on its own:

• €45.00 − €45.00 = €0.00
• €20.00 − €15.00 = €5.00

And the payout still sums to the transfer you received: €0.00 + €5.00 = €15.00.

Reading the column correctly

• A deduction can be larger than the negative booking itself. It also covers fees that the booking still owed but no longer had the funds to pay — which is why €50.00 of negative booking produces €60.00 of deductions in the example above.
• The deduction lands on the row that absorbs it. This is normally an account-level row. If the payout also contains a reservation that still pays out positively, that reservation absorbs the negative instead, and the deduction appears on its row.
• €0.00 is the normal value. The situation this column describes is genuinely rare.
• An empty cell means "not recorded". Payouts settled before we began recording these deductions show a blank rather than €0.00 — before August 2025 for account-level payouts, and before July 2026 for individual booking payouts.
• No amounts are affected by this column. It surfaces a deduction that was already being applied to your payouts; it doesn't create one. Payout figures and timing are unchanged.

Benefits

• Every row reconciles on its own. You can check Balance − Booking-level deduction = payout amount line by line, instead of reconstructing the arithmetic across the whole payout.
• Unexpected gaps are explained immediately. A row paying out €0.00 against a positive Balance is no longer a mystery to investigate — the reason is stated in the row itself.
• No need to contact support for these cases. The information you would previously have had to request is already in your export.
• Cleaner accounting. Absorbed negatives are visible and traceable, which makes reconciling channel transfers against your own books faster and easier to audit.