How to find unpaid folios in Cloudbeds

Short answer: in Cloudbeds, run the Account Balances Report, filter by check-out date, and read every positive balance. Black means the guest owes you. Red means you are holding the guest's money. Then open each folio before you chase it, because at our 50-room resort about half of what the first scan flagged turned out to be data noise, not debt.

This guide covers the manual way first, so you can do it tonight with no new software. Then what we learned doing it every night at Forest Springs Resort, a 50-room resort in Eureka Springs, Arkansas that runs on Cloudbeds. Then how we automated it.

Why unpaid folios pile up

A folio is the bill attached to a reservation. When a guest checks out with a balance above zero, somebody has to notice, and at a small hotel nobody's job is to notice. The front desk is checking people in. The GM is fixing the ice machine. The owner sees it at month end, if the bookkeeper flags it.

Small balances are the worst. A $40 folio is not worth a phone call on its own. Thirty of them is a staff member's week.

Step 1: Run the Account Balances Report

Cloudbeds' Account Balances Report is the report built for this job. Per Cloudbeds' help article, you can filter it by reservation source, check-in date and check-out date, or leave the dates blank to see every reservation. Cloudbeds itself recommends a standard procedure where staff "periodically filter the Check-out bookings" and act on any account with an outstanding balance.

Source: Account Balances Report, Cloudbeds help, checked 2026-09-26.

How to read it:

• Positive balance, shown in black: the guest owes money.
• Negative balance, shown in red: the guest paid too much, or paid ahead for future charges.
• The date filters do not change the balance. They only change which transactions you see. The Balance column uses the same Balance Due math as the folio itself, counting every transaction, posted or pending.

Do this: filter check-out date to the last 30 days. Sort by balance. Everything above zero on a checked-out stay is your worklist.

Step 2: Understand what "Balance Due" actually means

Cloudbeds calculates Balance Due the same way everywhere (folio, group folios, house accounts): Grand Total minus what was paid and transferred, plus refunds issued. It counts pending and posted transactions alike.

Source: Balance Due and Transaction Summary, Cloudbeds help, checked 2026-09-26.

Two things follow from that:

1. A pending charge you meant to void still counts. Clean up pending lines before you chase.
2. In the reservation panel, the balance turns red when money is owed, so your desk can spot it at checkout without opening the full folio. Same source.

Step 3: Add the two night audit reports

Cloudbeds lists a set of reports for night audit. Two of them catch money:

• Today's Checkouts: confirms every departing guest actually checked out or extended. A guest who left but is still "in house" or "confirmed" in the system hides a balance.
• Cancellations Report: shows cancelled reservations with their balance due, so you can see a cancellation fee nobody charged.

Source: Useful reports for night audit, Cloudbeds help, checked 2026-09-26.

Step 4: Export it if you want a spreadsheet

On the newer Reservations page, the Export Reservations wizard can include Deposit and Balance Due columns. One trap: filters you set on the list do not carry into the export, because the two use different data sources. Set your filters again inside the wizard.

Source: Reservations Management: Filtering and Flexible Exports, Cloudbeds help, checked 2026-09-26.

Step 5: Check the OTA virtual cards separately

A lot of "unpaid" money at a small hotel is not a guest who skipped out. It is an OTA virtual card nobody charged.

• Booking.com: each virtual card has an activation date (the first day you can charge it) and an expiration date. Cloudbeds' Booking.com VCC FAQ says the card expires 365 days after check-out, and with Payments Clarity you can see the card's balance, activation and expiration dates in the Special Requests field.
• Expedia: on Expedia Collect bookings you charge the Expedia virtual card, not the guest. When no expiration date comes with the booking, Cloudbeds indicates the card can be charged for up to 30 days after check-out.

Sources: Booking.com VCC FAQ, Expedia Collect vs Hotel Collect and Reservation credit cards, Cloudbeds help, checked 2026-09-26.

That 30-day window is the one that bites. Miss it and the money is gone.

Step 6: Decide what each balance is, then act

For every positive balance on a checked-out stay, pick one:

1. Real, the guest owes it. Charge the card on file or send a payment link.
2. Already paid, the PMS is stale. Post the missing payment so the folio closes.
3. Refunded or comped. Adjust the folio. Do not chase.
4. An OTA card you never charged. Charge the virtual card while it is still valid.

If you use Cloudbeds' Accounts Receivable feature, a balance on a checked-out folio can be moved to an AR ledger with the Transfer to Accounts Receivable button, so it leaves the folio but stays tracked.

Source: Manage your Accounts Receivables, Cloudbeds help, checked 2026-09-26.

A daily close you can copy

This is the standard we wrote for our own front desk on July 8, 2026, after the first scan. Three runs, every day:

1. Morning charge run, by 11 AM. Charge today's arrivals, including OTA virtual cards that are live on arrival day.
2. Checkout gate. Before anyone is checked out, look at Balance Due. Zero, check out. Anything else, collect first. A card that declines does not get waved through; it gets a payment link and goes to the GM the same day.
3. Evening close. Work the list: departing tomorrow and unpaid, in house and unpaid, checked out and still owing, stale bookings, and over-collected folios. Anything unpaid 7 days after checkout goes to the GM.

One rule matters more than the rest: only the GM checks a guest out over a balance, and write-offs get a one-line reason on the folio.

What we learned doing this every night at a 50-room resort

Forest Springs reopened in May 2026 on Cloudbeds. We have run this check every night since early July. Here is what the numbers taught us. All figures are aggregate.

1. The first scan finds real money

On July 3, 2026 we pulled all 430 June checkouts from Cloudbeds and read the balance on each. 16 folios showed $3,000+ in unpaid guest balances, and 89% of that was from guests who had already left.

The front desk had a habit behind it: small balances were assumed to be an OTA promo credit and waved through. We retired that rule. A balance is a balance until someone opens the reservation and proves otherwise.

2. About half of what a scan flags is not debt

The same scan flagged 30 folios in total. 13 of them, about $3,276, were bookings still marked "confirmed" after the stay ended: guests who stayed and paid, but were never checked in or out in the system. That is a status problem, not a collections problem.

The lesson: before you chase, check that the folio has charges behind the balance. A balance with no charges under it is a data gap, not a guest who owes you.

3. Payment labels matter

Our desk recorded Airbnb-collected stays under the payment label "Imported from previous system." Harmless to a person, confusing to any report: anything that skips that label will read a paid folio as unpaid. Rename payment methods so they say what they are.

4. Some "owed" money is just OTA timing

After the July scan, we traced every transaction posted on June folios through September 14: 12,047 transactions, 27 on those folios. At least one Booking.com balance was charged and then refunded for the same amount. Some balances were the OTA's ledger catching up, not a guest in debt. That is why we say the scan found $3,000+, not that we collected it.

5. Look at the red numbers too

On July 8, 2026, 68 folios held $5,234 more than the guests owed, mostly deposits never released. Money you hold that is not yours is a chargeback waiting to happen.

6. Never chase a folio with a refund on it

Our rule: any refund activity on a folio, full or partial, takes it off the chase list. Chase only after checkout, never deposits before arrival, and skip balances under $10.

7. "Nothing owed" is rarely true

If a report cannot read a folio, it should say "possibly owed, check it," not $0.

How YieldWizard automates it

Everything above works by hand. It takes discipline every single night, and that is the part that slips.

The Wizard runs the same checks every night on your Cloudbeds data:

• Unpaid folios on checked-out stays, with the balance, age and channel, on one chase list for your team.
• Virtual cards nobody charged, flagged before they expire and queued for your front desk.
• Commission charged on cancelled stays, with the amount to claim back.
• Each finding stays open until it is fixed, so it does not vanish from a report the next morning.
• It emails or texts your GM, follows up, and escalates to you when something is late. Follow-ups start only when you turn them on.

It does not charge cards or send refunds on its own. Your team does that in Cloudbeds. The Wizard builds the list and keeps it honest. How the connection works is in our Cloudbeds help article.

See what it catches on your own numbers: Find the money, read the Forest Springs track record, or see YieldWizard for Cloudbeds hotels. Related: why most rate parity alerts are wrong.

Forest Springs figures are aggregates from Cloudbeds folio pulls on the dates given. The unpaid balance figure is from the first billing scan of June 2026 folios, July 3, 2026, checked against Cloudbeds.