Some users have asked about how to change or update information on the invoices. This would depend on the status of the invoices, as summarized below:

1. For invoices in “Pending” or “Review” status: 
As these invoices have not yet been transferred to the back-office module, you can edit them directly, without any impact to the back-office accounting:

• Login to the invoice module, search for the invoice and click ‘edit’ to make changes to the invoice.
• To make changes to the products or insurance items, once the invoice opens (under the first ‘Booking Details’ tab), scroll down to where the “product” and “insurance” section. You can click on ‘edit’ besides any product or insurance item, which will open the product or insurance window. Make the changes/upgrades to the product or insurance item, including the customer fare or supplier net cost information, and click on the “Save Product” or “Save Insurance” button.
• Remember to always click on “Save Invoice” when making changes.

2. For invoices in “Complete” status:
Although these invoices are “complete” you can change the status back to “pending” or “review” and then follow the steps in (1) above. To change the invoice status:

• Login to the invoice module, search for the invoice and click ‘edit’.
• Once the invoice opens, you will notice that it is in a read-only format, except for the Invoice Status field (a drop-down field), which you can change.
• Change the status to either “pending” or “review”, and click the “Save Invoice” button.
• After the status is changed, follow the steps in (1) above to change or update information in the invoice.

 3. For invoices in “Accounting” status:
As these invoices are now in the back-office accounting stage, no changes are permitted from the invoice module (to preserve the integrity of the invoices). However, you can still make any edits/updates to these invoices, but only through the back-office module. To do this:

• Login to the back-office module (you must be assigned a user role of “Administrator” or “Accountant” to do this. For agents, please check with the office “Administrator” or “Accountant” to make this change).
• Once logged into the back-office module, click on “Invoice Management from the left-side menu.
• Search for the invoice and click on ‘edit’ to edit the invoice.
• Make changes, as normal, to the invoice.

(Please note: if you need to record a refunded amount to these invoices, you can add a payment, and put a negative (”-”) sign before the amount to record the amount refunded).

If you have any specific questions about a certain invoice, do drop us a note and we will walk you through it.

Part I: 

I’ve always known, in the back of my mind, why I started the business and where I see the business going. But I never truly formalized it and wrote it down. This is probably true of many business owners. Many have argued that having a written down vision and mission statement (and yes, there is also confusion on what these mean) is a waste of time and we should just “get on with it” and run the business.  

Back in the 80’s (last century), large corporations were dishing out millions to high-priced consultants just to come up with brilliant vision and mission statements for their company. This fad appeared to have fizzled out quickly. Why? Perhaps because developing a strong vision and mission (for your business or yourself) that will inspire and motivate others is truly a personal journey and requires a personal reflection into your passions and inspirations. Something high-priced consultants would never be able to achieve. Developing a vision and mission statement for simply the sake of developing a vision or mission statement is pointless. 

So Why Bother? 

I came across this quote recently:

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind transcends limitation, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

- Patanjali (First to Third Century B.C.) 

Although written over 2000 years ago, I believe these words still ring true today, in both business and your personal lives. It reminds me of the old Jerry Maguire movie where Jerry woke up in the middle of the night, inspired, and wrote out a long mission statement. He titled it “The things we think and do not say”. 

That got me thinking. As I said, I’ve always known, in the back of my mind, why I started the business and where I see the business going. But this doesn’t allow me to communicate the message, the purpose of the business and our values to the rest of the team, our partners, or to our clients. 

Whether you are a one-person travel company, or have a large number of agents, I believe that having a formal vision and mission for your travel business (or any other business) should give you a long-term purpose and help inspire and drive you and your staff to stretch and grow. The vision and mission should bring a common purpose that you and your staff believe in, motivating and inspiring them in their daily lives. The vision and mission give you a means to measure the success of your business against.  So I sat down to try and formalize our vision and mission. 

Passions and Inspirations:

Does your vision have to be huge to be worthy? Absolutely not! However, I believe that your vision and mission should be driven from your passions and inspirations. This may not be as easy as it seems. Should this be an individual exercise or done as a team (if you have one), capturing the passions and inspirations of the entire team and translating that into your company’s vision and mission statement. I don’t have the answer as to which is a better approach (let me know your thoughts), but in our case, I decided to go it alone.  

What worked for me was to take some quiet time away from any disruptions. I went to a place where I could play some quiet background music and have no disruptions from phone calls, e-mails, or family. This time allowed me to reflect deeply into what mattered to me the most. I reflected on two ideas (which I found on the Franklin Covey website), which made me think about what drove me and made me happy: 

• I thought back to a moment in my life when I truly felt really excited about life. I reflected on what I was doing at that moment, who I was with, what I was feeling, and most importantly, why I felt excited.
• I asked myself, straight from my heart, if I could never fail, what would I do? 

Of course, the answers to these are very personal. But from this, I was able to identify the elements that drove me and made me happy. My passions and inspirations. And through this, I found a clearer vision for the business. I then set out to formalize my vision and mission statements. 

In the next part, I will share with you what I came up with in terms of our vision and mission statements.  

We’re into the final home stretch of 2007, and along with our best wishes for this Holiday Season, we thought we could offer some year-end ideas to help you wrap-up 2007 and plan for 2008. In many cases, we have made reference to the TravelOffice system. However, we believe these same ideas/steps may be followed to manage any business and ensure you have a smooth close and can plan your business for the future. 

q       Complete all outstanding sales invoices:
During the year, we all get busy focusing on sales, marketing, and other aspects of running our business. While ideally, you have been entering and reviewing sales invoices in the TravelOffice system regularly, you may have fallen behind leaving some invoices still in the “pending” or “review” status that should be “completed”.  

To ensure you maintain complete and accurate accounting records, monitor your receivables/payables, and can start fresh for next year, organize and complete any outstanding invoices for your business. Make sure you review each of these sales invoices to ensure that they are accurately and completely recorded and then mark them as complete if they meet your definition of “completed” invoices. 

q       Reconcile your books:
Why reconcile? Reconciling your records ensures that your accounting records are accurate and complete, help you catch any mistakes or errors, and therefore better control your business. From the back-office module, you can reconcile all amounts received or paid to their source reports or bank statements. Here are some items that you should reconcile: 

• Reconcile sales amounts received from your customers and deposited to your bank account (if applicable, these would be the amounts deposited into the Trust Bank Account).  If these payments were charged to your customer’s credit/debit card, reconcile the amount received (net of any transaction fees) as per the TravelOffice system against the statements from your “Card Payment Processor”, and to the actual amount deposited into your bank account. This will ensure that you have received all amounts accurately from your card payment processor. 
• Reconcile commission amounts received from suppliers to your bank statement (if applicable, these would be amounts deposited to your General Bank Account). 
• Reconcile payments made to suppliers (either by cheque or company credit card) to your bank statement (if applicable, these would be amounts paid from the Trust Bank Account). 

Once you have completed all necessary sales invoices, and reconciled the amounts received and paid to your bank statements, you can:

• If applicable, record any transfers made from the trust bank account to the general bank account in the TravelOffice system.
• Generate the Sales-Related Journal Entries and post them to your General Ledger. 

q       Organize all expense receipts:
Hopefully, you already maintain separate folders to store receipts for your various expenses (such as rent, utilities, telephone, payroll, and internet). In order to save us time in tabulating all the various expenses, we also maintain a separate Excel file where we record these various expenses on a monthly basis. Within this Excel file, we maintain a separate tab for each type of expense and at the end of the month/year we simply take the totals and post it into our General Ledger system. We find that this works very well for smaller size organizations. If you would like a template copy of our Excel file, please send us a quick e-mail at info [at] merang.com and we will be happy to send it you. 

In addition to these expenses, there may be other expense items such as depreciation or other write-offs of assets that you should also consider. You need to maintain accurate records of your fixed assets and properly calculate and depreciate these assets. Also, consider writing-off any receivable amounts that may not be collectible. From a tax perspective, these expenses may offset your income and help reduce your total tax owing. Therefore, proper planning can help you save money. However, do keep in mind that there may be differences in the calculation of these expenses for tax purposes versus for accounting purposes. You may need to check with your accountant for further details. 

q       Monitor the health of your business:
While you should be monitoring your business on an ongoing basis, this is a good time as any to take stock of your business. Through the TravelOffice system, you can generate various management reports to monitor sales activity, who owes you, and who you owe. You should also generate your financial statements (i.e. Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Cash Flow Statement) and review these, after all journal entries have been posted.  

There are various financial ratios (such as liquidity ratios, current ratios, debt-equity ratios etc.) and analysis that can be generated based on the information in these financial statements and reports that will provide you insights into the health of your business. In future postings, we will provide you with further details of these various ratios and analysis and interpret what they mean. A quick Google search will also take you to various online calculators that will calculate them for you. 

Monitoring the health of your business at this stage will help you plan and prepare better for 2008. You should also analyse other customer and marketing statistics of your business that will help you better focus your marketing efforts in 2008. 

From the Team at Merang, we hope the year to come will be full of personal accomplishments and great success for you and your company. 

We just added a few more features to the Invoicing Module which, we hope, you will find useful. Here is a summary of them:

1. Agent Dashboard:

When you log in to the invoicing module, you will now notice 4 boxes; previously we only had 2 boxes (create new invoice, and search invoice).

• My Booking Activity: Provides a quick summary of the commission earned for the company (”Total Commission” ) and agents (”My Commission”). Based on the user’s role, they would see either the information for their own invoice, or can switch between their invoices or the company’s/office’s invoices. Please note that the booking activity only displays the commission information for invoices that are in the post-review status (i.e. that are “completed”, in “Accounting” or “Closed”). Also, the information displayed is for the previous month, current month, and year-to-date (YTD).
  
• Who Owes Me: This box provides a list of customers who still have an amount owing to your company. Based on the user’s role, they would see either the information for their own invoice, or can switch between their invoices or the company’s/office’s invoices. The information displayed is for invoices in all stages ( i.e. also includes those invoices in “Pending” or “Review” status). The list only displays the first 8, and if you need to see the complete listing, click on “Full Report”. Dates highlighted in red are past-due. If you click on the icon, a copy of the invoice opens so that you can obtain the customer’s contact information and you can view all details of their booking.

Please note for both new boxes: For users who have been assigned a role of “Inside” or “Outside” agent, they would see this information for their own invoices only . For users who have been assigned a role of “Manager” can switch between seeing information for their own invoices and all of the office invoices (for their branch). For users who have been assigned a role of “Administrator” or “Accountant” can switch between seeing information for their own invoices and all of the company’s invoices. 

2. A better Search:

We have improved the search invoices box so that you can now also search by booking date. Also, you can select a period of time to search by Booking Date or Departure Date. When the search results are displayed, we have also included the field for “Booking Date”.

We successfully launched version 3.0 of the TravelOffice system in October. Since then, many of you asked us to summarize the changes/enhancements and highlight new features added. So here goes:

• Simplified Login Page:
  The login pages for both modules (invoice and back-office) has been simplified with a single login page. Also, we created a quick link to switch between the Invoice Module and Back-office Module quickly without logging out (for users assigned with Administrator, Accountant, or Manager roles).  
• Invoice Module Enhancements:
  We changed the layout of the customer invoices generated through the system. In addition, we added two more payment options under the customer and supplier payments sections:
   - Supplier Coupon: for customers that redeem supplier coupons
  - Cash (Non-Trust Account): For payments made to suppliers not through the Trust account.(Both of these also affect the Trust Account calculations and the Journal Entries, which have also been modified to accept these).
• Back-office Module Enhancements:
  Travel Document Requirements Profile: You can create ’standard travel document requirements’ profiles for various destinations. Then, on the invoice, simply select the ‘travel document requirements’ statement for the destination to display on the invoice (This is for your compliance to travel industry requirements in various jurisdictions).Invoice Profile: You can now customize the various “Payment Titles” - the standard are ‘Adult Price’, ‘Child Price’, ‘Single Supplement’, ‘Surcharge’,'Taxes’, and ‘Other’. You can now customize these to meet your company’s requirements.

  Marketing Reports: We have now added a customer profiles marketing report which lets you print a list of your customers contact information (e.g. address, phone, fax, e-mail address) which can be used to create labels, send e-newsletters or bulk marketing e-mails etc.

Our team is currently working on some more minor modifications, which we hope to release within the next few weeks (release 3.1).

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new blog. Written by the team at Merang, through the TravelOffice blog we will provide valuable tips and tricks on using the TravelOffice system and highlight new features and version releases. But this is more than just a blog about our product. Through this blog, the Merang Team will share our thoughts on entrepreneurship, managing a travel business, team work, building a better business, and other things we are passionate about.

We hope you find this blog provides you with ideas and insights and, perhaps even inspiration, to running and growing your travel business.