Day 5: Compare the total price, deposit and remaining balance

Choose one offer with fixed details

Record the offer, option, date, participant count and selected extras. Add the chosen payment option and the review date. Compare information for precisely this case. An old confirmation for a different season or participant count is not evidence for the current option.

Open the public offer and the last booking summary you can safely reach. For the confirmation, use an existing anonymised message for the matching case or an approved test preview. Do not create a real booking, payment or message for this exercise. If no matching confirmation is available, record “not verifiable” and name someone who can provide a suitable preview.

Compare prices, amounts and deadlines

Copy the visible text as closely as possible. “Balance later” is an observed statement, but it does not establish a due date. A team member should not fill in missing information verbally and then mark the page complete.

Check the service, participants, total price, amount due now, evidenced payments, remaining balance, due date and payment method. Mark each item “consistent”, “different” or “not verifiable”. A missing value is not a zero balance. A confirmation may describe a later state than the booking summary, so account for any evidenced payments made in between.

Fictional case: Correct amounts, conflicting timing

In this example, the selected course option costs EUR 240 in total. EUR 80 is due when booking, leaving EUR 160. The offer says “at reception before the first session”, while the existing test confirmation says “by bank transfer seven days before the start”.

Eighty plus 160 does equal 240. The guest's next step is still contradictory. Do not simply choose the wording you prefer. The responsible person first establishes which arrangement applies to this offer. Only then should the affected text and templates be aligned. The amounts and payment methods are fictional, not TIDEFORCE pricing or a promise of availability.

Explain which amount is due and when

Record the agreed wording in the German “Anzahlung und Restzahlung erklären” PDF worksheet. It brings together the total price, amount due now, remaining balance, due date and payment method. Request the German worksheet with your email address using the form at the end of this article.

Use the details your school has actually confirmed. With full payment, the remaining balance may be zero; it should not disappear merely because a deposit template is missing. If several payment options are allowed, check each as a separate case. Keep an equipment security deposit separate from the booking price rather than silently including it in one of these amounts.

Assign the correction to a responsible person

Record the affected location, current wording, confirmed replacement wording, responsible person and review date. For a template, note which offers and languages use it. This helps avoid correcting only a single example booking while leaving the underlying template unchanged.

Repeat the same comparison after the change. If a confirmation is still unavailable, that part remains open. Do not change an existing agreement through an incidental copy edit; clarify the intended statement with the responsible person first.

Ask someone to explain the next step

Ask someone outside the editing process to read the corrected text: What does the selected service cost in total? What is due now? What remains to be paid, when and how? Record any remaining question verbatim.

Today's output is a checked statement for one offer, not measured revenue impact. A simple progress measure is the number of open or contradictory rows in this comparison. The next offer is a separate test case.

Request the one-page German PDF using the email form at the end of this article. Further reading: Explain deposits and remaining payments clearly. The PDF is in German. Payment options depend on your school's actual configuration.