Deposit Now, Balance Later — and the Books Stay Right
Asking for everything up front costs you bookings
A guest finds your place, loves it, and is ready to book a stay three months out. Then they hit the payment screen and it wants the full amount today. For a lot of guests, that’s the moment they hesitate — and a hesitating guest is a guest who goes to “think about it” and books somewhere else.
So you do what every seasoned host does: you take a deposit to hold the dates and collect the balance closer to arrival. It’s the right call. The problem has always been everything that happens after you make it — chasing the balance by hand, remembering who’s paid what, and reconciling two payments that arrived weeks apart against one booking.
Airflow handles the whole lifecycle for you. The guest pays a deposit, the dates are held, the balance is tracked automatically, and the books stay right at every single stage. Here’s how it works.
The host sets the rule once
You decide how guests can pay, per property, in your settings. The options are simple:
- Pay in full — the whole booking value at checkout.
- Deposit — a percentage of the total now (you set the percentage), with the balance due before arrival.
That’s the choice that does the work. Set a deposit policy on a property and every guest who books it gets the deposit option at checkout automatically — no per-booking fiddling, no manual invoicing, no follow-up reminders to write yourself.
Beyond a single deposit, Airflow also has the groundwork for staged and monthly payment schedules for longer stays. Those are rolling out — this post is about the deposit-then-balance flow, which is live now.
The guest pays the deposit — and the dates are held
When a guest chooses the deposit option, they’re charged just the deposit at checkout, not the full amount. The moment that deposit lands, the dates are held and the booking is confirmed. Your calendar reflects it, the guest gets their confirmation, and the slot is off the market.
Behind the scenes, Airflow records exactly what happened: how much was paid, how much remains, and that the booking now sits in a deposit paid state with a balance still due. None of that is something you have to track. It’s recorded the instant the deposit clears.
The balance tracks itself
This is the part that used to live in a spreadsheet — or worse, in your head.
Once the deposit is in, Airflow knows the remaining balance and the date it’s due (typically before check-in). As arrival nears, the guest gets a payment link for the balance through their guest portal, where they can see exactly what they’ve already paid, what’s left, and a button to settle it.
When the balance is paid, the booking flips to fully paid on its own. The amount remaining drops to zero, the status changes, and you didn’t have to send a single “just a reminder about your balance” email. The deposit held the dates; the balance closed the booking; you stayed out of the admin entirely.
The books stay right at every stage
A two-part payment is where accounting usually goes sideways. One booking, two payments, weeks apart — it’s exactly the kind of thing that drifts out of sync if a human is keeping the ledger.
Airflow keeps it reconciled automatically. Each payment is recorded as it happens, and the booking’s payment schedule updates to match. Deposit recorded, balance recorded, schedule marked off — the booking always reflects precisely what’s been received and what hasn’t.
And here’s where it ties into something we shipped alongside this: your commission is charged proportionally, per payment. When the deposit lands, you pay commission on the deposit. When the balance lands, you pay commission on the balance. You’re never charged commission on money that hasn’t arrived yet — and if a guest pays a deposit and never comes back for the balance, the commission on that balance is simply never charged. We wrote about exactly how that works in Commission on What You Collect, Not What You Hope to Collect.
Put the two together and the picture is clean: every payment is recorded, the schedule updates, and the commission matches the cash. Your accounting reflects exactly what you’ve actually received — not a single dollar of optimism baked in.
It works the same across every payment method
This isn’t a card-only feature. The deposit-then-balance lifecycle works no matter how your guests pay:
| Payment method | How the deposit and balance flow |
|---|---|
| Card (Stripe) | Guest is charged the deposit at checkout, then the balance via their portal link later. Each payment settles to your Stripe account, with commission taken proportionally and automatically at the moment of each charge. |
| Paystack | Guest pays the deposit through Paystack (card, M-Pesa, or bank transfer), then the balance the same way. When the balance is verified, the booking flips to fully paid and the matching commission slice is billed for that payment. |
| Manual / bank transfer | You collect the deposit, mark it received, and the booking is held. When the balance arrives, you confirm it and the booking flips to fully paid — with the commission for each payment applied as you confirm it. |
For card and Paystack payments, the guest drives the balance payment themselves through their portal. For manual payments — where you’re the one marking the money received — you confirm each amount, and Airflow records it and updates the balance. (Manual payments also show you the exact commission before you confirm anything, so there are no silent charges. More on that in a future post.)
The host’s view: no spreadsheet, one screen
Open any booking in your portal and the whole payment story is right there:
- Deposit paid — the amount already collected.
- Balance remaining — what’s still due.
- Status — whether it’s deposit paid or fully paid.
That’s it. No tab-switching, no reconciling two payments against one reservation, no wondering whether the balance ever came in. The booking detail page is the single source of truth, and it’s always current because it updates itself as each payment lands.
One honest note on deposits
Deposits are non-refundable — that’s the whole point of taking one. It protects you if a guest backs out, because you keep what they’ve paid to hold the dates. Because Airflow only ever charges commission on money you’ve actually received, a guest who pays a deposit and cancels leaves you in a clean position: you keep the deposit, and the commission you paid matches exactly what you kept. Nothing was charged on the balance that never arrived. (We unpack that scenario fully in the commission post.)
The principle
Taking a deposit shouldn’t mean taking on a second job. You make one decision — how guests can pay — and Airflow handles the rest of the lifecycle: holding the dates, tracking the balance, prompting the guest, flipping the booking to paid, and keeping the accounting reconciled the entire way.
You collect a deposit, you collect a balance, and the books stay right in between. That’s the whole idea.
Want to see how guest payments and deposits flow end to end? Read Guest Payments & Deposits, or take a closer look at how Airflow handles direct bookings. If you’re not set up yet, get started here.