The commission Booking.com invoices you for a reservation doesn't appear to match what the guest actually paid, and this explains why and how to reconcile the two figures.
You look at what a guest paid on their Booking.com receipt, apply your contracted commission rate, and the number doesn't match what the commission invoice actually shows. The two documents are describing the same booking from different angles, and reconciling them means understanding which figure each one is actually based on.
The guest's receipt reflects what they were charged — their room total, plus any taxes, fees or extras Booking.com or the property added on top. The commission invoice reflects what Booking.com deducts based on your contracted rate applied to the booking value it uses for that calculation, which is not always the identical figure the guest saw, particularly once taxes, fees or a promotion are involved.
When these two numbers are compared directly without accounting for that difference, it looks like an overcharge or an error, when often it's simply two different bases being compared as if they were one.
Taxes and certain local fees are often excluded from the commissionable amount, since commission is typically calculated on the room revenue rather than taxes passed through to authorities. A promotion the guest used can also mean the amount they paid differs from your standard rate, and commission is calculated against the rate the booking was actually made at, not your usual rate card. If the reservation was modified after booking — a date change, an added night — the commission figure should reflect the final version of the booking, which can differ from what you expect if you were still picturing the original request.
Start from the reservation record in the Booking.com extranet, which should show the final booking value the commission was calculated against — this is more reliable than reconstructing it from the guest's receipt alone. Subtract taxes and any pass-through fees from the guest's total first, so you're comparing room revenue against room revenue rather than room revenue against a tax-inclusive figure. Then apply your contracted commission rate to that adjusted number and compare it to the invoice line for that specific reservation.
Real commission per channel keeps the commission figure tied to the actual recorded booking value for each reservation, rather than something to recalculate by hand from a receipt every time a question comes up. Prime Shield adds the guest side of the comparison, checking the rate you sent, the rate you intended, and what the guest actually paid against each other, and flagging any gap worth more than 5% in plain money. Together they turn this kind of reconciliation from a manual exercise into something you can check at a glance — the public demo at try.primehostpartners.com is open to try without signing up.