Hello ATO Community.
We are a hotel and our rooms are advertised on an OTA ("online travel agent", one of those well-known pages where you go when you want to find accommodation deals).
A guest books a room though the OTA's website and pays the OTA the full advertised amount (let's say AUD 100 for the sake of simplicity) and the OTA transfers that amount minus their commission to us (that's usually a 15%). That means we get AUD 85 in our bank account for that room.
Time to invoice that. The OTA's website states that
As a platform, [OTA name] only facilitates the online booking reservations for your property and charges a commission for this service. As such, [OTA name] cannot offer an invoice to a booker for the accommodation services offered by you. Thus, any local requirement to provide a tax invoice at the sell rate remains your responsibility. [emphasis theirs]
So we make a tax invoice for AUD 100 that states that we are including 10% GST (that means AUD 90.91 nett and AUD 9.09 taxes).
For that booking we receive what the OTA calls a "Commercial invoice" entitled "Statement" that shows the commission that was retained from that booking.
[OTA name] operates a commercial model and provides an agent service. Where your property is GST/VAT registered it should self-assess GST&VAT on the amount denoted on the Commercial Statement. The property does not need to issue any receipt or pay anything back to [OTA name]. It is your obligation to issue tax invoices to guests (where legally required) on request, with applicable taxes on the reference sell rates.
Such statement has a "Tax" column that says AUD 0.00 on those AUD 15 commission. Also shows a Singaporean address for the OTA with a Singapore GST number and an Australian ARN.
If we do the BAS with the invoice data, we have to declare AUD 9.09 GST collected on an AUD 100 gross rate booking and AUD 0.00 GST paid for the commission of that booking.
If we let MYOB do the BAS automagically, MYOB has no awareness of any of the above, as it merely pulls the data from our bank statement, which will just have an entry of AUD 85 for that booking (we never pay the commission, we just don't collect that portion of the booking's full price). That means MYOB will declare AUD 7.73 GST collected on a nett rate of 77.27.
I suppose ideally we should go the MYOB way because the other way we are declaring more GST than what we actually collect, but we cannot emit an invoice with those numbers, as in my understanding we are not allowed to discuss commissions with the guests they send us.
Sorry if I left out any vital details, I get confused even trying to figure out what my question is about the whole thing. I guess it is:
Is the OTA doing the right thing? Should we get a proper Tax Invoice from them stating how much GST are they collecting with that commission? Any ideas on how to solve the discrepancy between how we need to invoice things and how much money we are really getting?
Thanks!
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