Taxes and fees FAQs

A tax is a financial charge imposed by a government authority — for example, VAT (Europe), sales tax (USA), or ISS (Brazil). A fee is a charge in exchange for a service — for example, a cleaning fee, service charge, or booking fee. Both are configured in Finance > Taxes and Fees and follow the same setup process.

You can create as many taxes and fees as your property requires. There is no system limit. See Create and apply taxes and fees for the full setup steps.

Users need the Taxes and Fees role permission enabled to create or edit taxes and fees. By default, property owners have this access. Owners can grant this permission to other users. See Roles and permissions for more details.

This is the most common tax issue for properties connected to OTAs. Creating a tax in Finance does not automatically apply it to OTA reservations — you must complete a second step to connect the tax to each reservation source.

To apply a tax to OTA reservations:

1. Go to Account > Settings > Property > Sources > Third-Party Sources
2. Find the OTA source (for example, Booking.com or Expedia)
3. Click Configure Taxes/Fees For Source
4. Select the correct tax and click Save

If you open a reservation folio and don't see any tax line items, the most likely explanation is that you're viewing posted transactions only. Taxes on future room nights are held as pending transactions until the room rate is posted — they won't appear in the default folio view.

To see the full tax breakdown:

1. Open the reservation and go to the Folio tab
2. In the Transactions filter, change the view from Posted to include Pending transactions
3. Tax line items should now be visible alongside the pending room charges

A mismatch between OTA totals and Cloudbeds PMS totals is almost always caused by a difference in how taxes are configured on each side. OTAs can send rates as either tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive, and the setup in Cloudbeds PMS needs to match.

Common causes:

• Tax added twice — the OTA sends a tax-inclusive rate, but an exclusive tax is also applied to that source in Cloudbeds. The result is a higher total in Cloudbeds than on the OTA.
• Tax missing entirely — the OTA sends a tax-exclusive rate, but no tax has been applied to that source in Cloudbeds. The result is a lower total in Cloudbeds than on the OTA.
• Wrong tax type — the OTA expects inclusive handling but the tax in Cloudbeds is set to exclusive, or vice versa.

Before making any manual adjustments to a reservation, review your source tax configuration in Property > Sources > Third-Party Sources to confirm the setup matches the OTA's behavior. See Taxes and fees overview for more detail.

On the invoice summary, taxes and fees are always shown as separate line items from the room rate total. By default, the summary shows the combined total for all taxes and the combined total for all fees.

If you want each individual tax and fee type to appear broken out on the invoice, enable the Show tax/fee specifics on the invoice option:

1. Go to Account > Settings > Finance and click the Invoicing tab
2. Click Invoicing Settings
3. Check Show tax/fee specifics on the invoice
4. Click Save

Learn more: Invoicing — overview

No. The system does not allow configuring a tax with a rate of 0%. If you need a placeholder or a tax that should not charge anything, consider whether a fee with a $0 amount would meet your needs instead.

This is currently not supported in Cloudbeds PMS. Inclusive calculation is only available when using the Percentage of total rule, since a percentage-based tax can be calculated either on top of the base price or as a component of the final price. Fixed-amount taxes and fees can only be configured as exclusive.