Why does a deleted reservation still show a payment in my Transactions report?

Short answer: BRM never deletes a payment record, even when the reservation it belongs to is deleted or cancelled. Your Transactions report is a permanent account of money that has moved through your store, so by design it keeps showing a payment after the reservation is gone. This isn't a data-corruption bug — but there is a real setting that can clean it out of your view, described below.

Why you can't actually delete a reservation once it has a payment

If a reservation has any payment recorded against it — even a small test amount — Back Office refuses to permanently delete it. You'll see a message explaining the reservation "has payments recorded against it, so it can't be deleted" and pointing you to Cancel instead. This applies whether you're deleting a single reservation or using an admin bulk "delete all reservations" action — both are blocked the moment even one payment exists in your store.

What actually happens when you "delete" a test booking that has a payment on it

If you hit that block and cancelled the reservation instead of deleting it, here's what changed and what didn't:

• Cancelling sets the reservation's price to zero and clears its dates, so it drops out of your calendar and active-reservation views — which can easily look like it's been deleted.
• Cancelling does not remove the reservation record itself, and does not touch any payment already recorded against it.

Because the reservation still exists (it's cancelled, not gone) and its payment is untouched, the Transactions report keeps showing that payment exactly as before. The report doesn't check whether a reservation is active or cancelled — only whether a payment happened in the date range you searched. Nothing has been corrupted; the cancelled test booking's payment is simply still on your books, the same way any customer's payment would be.

If the reservation genuinely had no payment

A reservation that never had a payment recorded against it deletes outright and leaves nothing behind in Transactions — there was never a payment row to show. If something is still appearing in your Transactions report for a booking you're sure had zero payment, check whether a payment (even a token or $0 test one) was ever recorded against it via Record Payment — see ad hoc payment recording. That's what would have blocked the delete and left you needing to cancel instead.

Cleaning test payments out of your Transactions view

Where a payment's reservation really has been permanently deleted, that payment still shows in the report with no booking behind it. You can filter those out:

• On Reports → Transactions, tick the "Only payments with a booking" checkbox above the results. It's off by default, matching what the report has always shown. Turning it on removes, from both the rows and the total, any payment whose reservation no longer exists. When there are such payments in your date range, a notice above the table tells you how many, and whether they're currently included or excluded.
• The same toggle — also labelled "Only payments with a booking" — is available on Reports → Export Data when you choose the Transactions export type, so your CSV export can match what you see on screen.

Important: this filter only hides payments whose reservation was permanently deleted. It will not hide a payment that belongs to a cancelled reservation, because a cancelled reservation still exists — it just has a zero price and no dates. If your test bookings were cancelled rather than deleted, their payments will still show even with the filter switched on.

To avoid this with future test bookings

• Don't record a payment — not even a token test amount — against a reservation you're only creating to test something. Once a payment exists, BRM will only let you cancel that reservation, not delete it, and the payment stays on your financial reports permanently.
• If you do need to remove a test reservation entirely, delete it before recording any payment against it. See Delete Reservations for the delete steps — a reservation with no payment recorded deletes cleanly and leaves no trace in Transactions or its export.