About the GoBD
The German acronym GoBD stands for "principles for the proper management and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form, as well as data access".
GoBD principles apply to all areas in which operational processes are recorded by means of digital processing techniques, including payment systems. They pertain to all tax-relevant documents that are digitally recorded, used or archived. Every business transaction must be documented with a receipt and each German taxpayer is responsible for GoBD compliance.
GoBD core principles
To comply with GoBD, documents and bookings are required to meet these core principles:
# | GoBD | Little Hotelier |
Traceability | Every booking must be documented. Business transactions need to be documented progressively and in retrograde: from the receipt to the tax declaration and the other way round. The accounting must be comprehensible to a knowledgeable third party within a reasonable period of time, such that this party can obtain an overview of the business transactions and bookkeeping systems. In order to understand books and records, it is necessary to create informative and complete process documentation; the same applies to work instructions and their implementation. | Every booking in Little Hotelier is clearly documented and recorded. All reservations are displayed on Calendar or in Reservations. Cancelled reservations are not removed from the system but updated to a Cancelled status. Reservations cannot be deleted by users or internal team members. Reservations include payment processing, discounts, and refunds which are all tracked by Little Hotelier. Users may easily add additional transactions processed outside of the system in order to have complete transaction records. The General ledger feature gives comprehensible reservations and corresponding transactional information to a knowledgeable third party. |
Completeness | Full and gap-free documentation of individual business transactions. Secure storage, protection against loss. Technical and organisational controls (e.g. recoding and plausibility checks, analyses for gaps or repeat items). | Little Hotelier records all reservations, which cannot be deleted, ensuring complete and gap-free documentation. Little Hotelier uses state of the art cloud based technology hosted on AWS which provides scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure. If an exception in data occurs, which requires the underlying data of Little Hotelier to be altered, the only function that is able to perform that is the database administrator. Every alteration made by a database administrator is clearly logged with the user ID of the person who performed the alteration, data time and business & technical reason/sign-off |
Accuracy | Business transactions must be substantiated by supporting documents. Presentation based on accounting standards- It must be possible to track business transactions from origin to processing – authentically and seamlessly. | Reservation and fiscal transactions data is recorded and tracked from the time of creation. Any and all modifications to this data are also recorded real time. Little Hotelier maintains a unified data model across the application, data storage and archiving systems. This allows the system to maintain data integrity, traceability and security across the board. |
Timely bookings and recording | Business transactions must be recorded promptly after they occur. Recording of non-cash bookings within ten days. Daily recording of cash receipts and cash expenditures. Recording of periodic bookings by the end of the following month. | Little Hotelier provides the capability for property users to record all transactions. Due to the cloud based nature of Little Hotelier, all reservations and transactions are immediately stored upon users recording this information. However, it is the users' responsibility to log all cash and non-cash transactions into the system if not using an integrated payment gateway. |
Order | All bookings must be clear, distinct, orderly and comprehensible. They must be immediately legible and presented individually and objectively ordered according to the proper accounts. | Little Hotelier has a General ledger feature that enables users to clearly visualise bookings and transactions per booking:
|
Immutability | A booking must not be modified in such a way that the original content is no longer detectable. Changes and deletions from and to electronic bookings must be recorded. | Every transaction made within Little Hotelier is stored in an immutable data source, which cannot be altered by the customers. The customers have no point of entry to alter data, other than in a way where a new record for any alteration is created. A snapshot of the reservation data is taken for every modification made and stored to track all changes. |
Retention | German tax laws further require that all (electronic and paper-based) accounting records are stored in Germany, all bookkeeping entries are performed in Germany and the associated IT systems are located in Germany. All original receipts must be retained on German territory for 10 years. | Every transaction made within Little Hotelier for every reservation is stored in an immutable data source, with archiving functions built in. Once this data has been stored, it can be retrieved at any time by using the General ledger feature to view a breakdown of the transactions made. In addition to archiving transaction level data, Little Hotelier also archives all cumulative and perpetual closings data. Archived data is never purged and hence is available for the lifetime of a customer's system usage. |
The General ledger
Little Hotelier provides a General Ledger feature (navigate to Setup > General ledger#) to ensure compliance with GoBD core principles. This feature tracks fiscal transactions, allows users to visualize bookings and related transactions, and provides clear reservation and transaction information for third parties such as auditors. More information on the General ledger can be found here.