For DMCs / inbound tour operators having a good and clean accounting system is essential.
The Accounting system gives you the real hard numbers. How did we do? This is the essential system for making sure that money comes in and goes out to the right people.
But, the accounting system is an island, it requires knowledge transferred into it to perform it’s duty and can thus quickly be seen as administrative burden. Of course it not – if the right methods are applied it will give you the operational certainty you need to steer your company without having to spend large resources on feeding it.
When you have chosen Nitro, you have the basis for making things easier. It contains most of the information that your tours business will receive/send financial documents about.
The inbound business – spending the resources right
When you package tours in incoming tourism, you often end up with 10 times as many supplier invoices as client invoices. These have to be registered, approved and paid.
This is the primary intersection between Nitro and the accounting system.
The second overlap of information happens with the client invoice.
There might be other factors, but these are the all-overshadowing intersections between Nitro and your accounting system.
The biggest resource draw – Supplier invoices
Because of the 10x amount of supplier invoices vs client invoices, this is where we should spend our energy.
When a supplier invoice comes in it goes through 3 processes.
1) Registration and identification – Accounts register that an invoice has been received, and for which tours it involves.
2) Approval – checking if it’s correct, free policy has been applied, already invoiced, potentially requesting corrections.
3) Payment process – registering and processing the payment through the accounting system.
Nitro provides information for easily handling the first 2 steps.
In essence, Nitro knows what all the bookings performed through the system should cost and why.
There are multiple methods of doing this:
1) Accounts look up the booking, register and approve the invoice directly in Nitro – this accounting user access is free of charge and quite efficient.
This is a super easy way to get started and by far the recommended approach for a small to medium company that is starting with Nitro.
2) Use an invoice scanning system – There exist systems that can scan your emails to the accounting department for invoices and based of a list that is pulled from Nitro it can automatically register and approve incoming invoices. This of course gives more automation but also has a higher degree of setup, costs and integration complexity.
3) Hybrids where the accountant is able to query booking information from Nitro while registering the invoice in the accounting system. This is a middle efficiency solution, and while it keep things simpler if you have a flexible accounting system that allows for external querying of information, it might not be the solution that you would choose in a couple of years from now since it has some costs in relation to customizing your accounting system.
In case you are considering Nitro and in that relation what that means for accounting:
1) Know that there are many good possibilities available.
2) Don’t change everything at once! Your staff will feel that it’s dramatic enough to change the quotation and operations system.
3) You can easily optimize this process step-by-step afterwards.
The second largest resource draw – Client invoices
The not so large invoice draw can also be handled with Nitro / accounting
– You can either create invoices directly in Nitro with our invoicing module or you can upload invoices from your invoicing system.
– You can get lists of invoices created and in which tours either as CSV reports or through API calls with manageable JSON output.
– If you create invoices through Nitro, it will be based on the quotation that you sent the client.
– You will be able to have a financial overview report through Nitro that you can use to crosscheck with your account system figures if the totals does not match.
Just like for supplier invoices, In case you are considering Nitro and in that relation what that means for accounting:
1) Know that there are many good possibilities available.
2) Don’t change everything at once! Your staff will feel that it’s dramatic enough to change the quotation and operations system.
3) You can easily optimize this process step-by-step afterwards.
How to integrate – access our Nitro API
When you have decided that you want to be able to pull information from Nitro or push information to it, you should have a look at our API.
The Nitro API (click the link) is for technical people, but the overview can also benefit most business people as you have an overview of what is readily accessible.
A side note: Planning for the future in inbound tour operations
It’s important to be able to plan your upcoming season for your tours business. Do you have enough staff to handle the operations? Do you need to reach out to more potential customers to reach your goals?
There’s many ways of doing it – many companies that don’t use Nitro use excel or special fields in their accounting software. This requires strong discipline to ensure that the numbers are up to date.
When your company is using Nitro, there will always be an entry for your tour, and your staff can give their professional estimates on the expected business (E.g. next spring, likely 25pax + Half board). Nitro can also calculate the expected expenses.
So, Nitro can give you good projections of how the future looks with your planned tours, but the end result is from your accounting system.
