This is a serious deficiency in the accounting system. It may be symptomatic of the way transactions are being treated. I've been searching for more complaints, and am in conversation with Support regarding these problems. In addition to mis-applying adjustments, it makes it very difficult to reconcile accounts. There have been blog posts to Medium.com regarding the Airbnb transaction system, expressing pride in how they are able to ensure through double-entry accounting that money is not "missing", at least as regards Airbnb's interests. It is interesting to consider money being transferred to a "wrong" account. Airbnb's system would think everything was ok, because a charge to one account would be balanced with a credit to another. There would be no money "missing". But if the money was earned by your property but paid to someone else's account, it would seem missing to you! There is no easy way to confirm it's going where it should as outlined below. The problem with resolution adjustments may be a result of the flaw I discuss.
Below is the summary of the problem I submitted to Support:
While the audit trail might be apparent from Airbnb's view of the accounts, a host's view has deficiencies that create headaches.
An example (I will ignore both host and guest fees for simplicity)
A host has payout rules splitting 90% to payee#1, 10% to payee#2
A reservation is made for $100.
The host's transaction history shows
trx1: Reservation: $90
trx2: Payout: transfer to payee#1 $90
nothing else is shown, so the host cannot verify the amount sent to payee#2, and the full reservation amount is not shown.
For a different property with a payout rule of 20% to payee#1, 80% to payee#3
A reservation is made for $100.
The host's transaction history shows
trx3 Reservation: $80
trx4 Payout to payee#3 $80
trx5 Reservation: $20
trx6 Payout to payee#1 $20
In this case the entire reservation shows up, and the payouts can be tracked.
I would submit that the logic is flawed - the reservation is being split according to payout rules, when only the payout should be split.
This has implications for a host trying to reconcile the accounts. The host must transfer manually each reservation amount in order to track the "missing" funds. They need to get the records of receipts from each payee and match those with the "missing" amounts. There is no simple way to reconcile using the transaction history that can be downloaded as a .csv file.
The above transactions should be revealed to the host as:
trx1: Reservation $100
trx2: Payout transfer to payee#1 $90
trx3: Payout transfer to payee#2 $10
trx4: Reservation $100
trx5: Payout transfer to payee#3 $80
trx6: Payout transfer to payee#1 $20
The deficiency has real world consequences. Resolution adjustments are not being charged against the originating reservation, which would allow splitting the charges against the payout accounts according to the payout rules. Instead they are being charged directly against payout accounts with no regard to the reservations (and therefore not against the relevant property, for multi-property hosts), but are arbitrarily applied against a single payout account.
In the case that is the proximate cause of my examining this, a large resolution was applied entirely against a 10% payee, wiping out their income for over a month, even though they only originally received 10% of the original reservation. This is unfair and wrong and because none of the transactions were exposed to the property host, hard to uncover.
The only thing apparent was that the 10% payee was claiming to not have received any income, and that Airbnb's support center could not tell whether or not the payments had been made. Everything from Airbnb's view looked correct, but from the host's and payee's view funds were missing.
This is something that needs to be examined in depth by the designers of Airbnb's financial reporting and payouts system.