Nobody can say what the March group earned
Ask an operator what margin the March group made and the honest answer is usually “give me a week”. The itinerary lives in a shared spreadsheet and the operations manager’s head. The hotel bills, the guide’s day rate, the coach hire and the airline allocation arrive over the next two months, each addressed to the company rather than to a group. Matching one set against the other is somebody’s evening job, and the number it produces is a guess with a decimal point on it.
The travel module answers that by giving the trip a document of its own, the money its own documents, and one button between them.
A template with day numbers, a group with dates
A tour program is the itinerary written once — three nights in Cairo, fly south on day 4, the Valley of the Kings on day 5. It carries day numbers instead of dates, and enforces one piece of arithmetic before it saves: the nights across the accommodation lines must add up to the program’s day count.
A tour is one real group. Enter the arrival date first — pick a program with that field empty and nothing is copied — and the system dates the whole itinerary. Accommodation lines chain end to end from arrival, each stay checking in the day the one above it checks out, while service and flight lines take arrival plus their day number minus one. Day 1 is the arrival day, not the morning after.
The copy runs once and then stops. Edit the program next month and the tours already built keep the hotel they were built with, which is what you want when a group is in the air.
The vouchers are written for the supplier
A hotel voucher is the slip the property receives: the party the booking is held for, the two dates of the stay, the head count split into adults and children, the room counts, and the meal plan recorded as counts rather than one choice, since half a group can be on half board and the rest on bed and breakfast. Starting With and Ending With name the meal the stay opens and closes on, which tells a kitchen whether to expect forty people the evening they land. A restaurant voucher does the same for one meal, and both carry an Extras flag that settles in advance who pays for the minibar.
Travel does not use the supply-chain cycle
This is the part that surprises people who know the rest of Nama. The module does not raise an ordinary purchase order or an ordinary sales invoice. It ships six financial documents of its own — travel service purchase order, purchase invoice and purchase return; travel service sales order, sales invoice and sales return — for one reason: nothing here ever moves in inventory.
There is no goods receipt, no warehouse on a line, no quantity on hand, no item cost to relieve. Buying two hundred room-nights raises a cost and a liability, and that is the whole of its effect — on the travel purchase side the invoice is the only document that matters, because there is nothing to receive.
The counterparty is different too. A hotel, a restaurant and a guide are not shadowed by supplier records: each is its own travel master file carrying its own accounts, and each sits directly in the account-party field where a supplier would otherwise go. Airlines and coach companies really are suppliers, and use ordinary supplier records on the same document.
From the tour to the orders, in five passes
Create Tourism Service Purchase Orders sits in the tour’s More menu, and walks the saved document five times: accommodation lines grouped by hotel, flight lines by supplier, and service lines three separate ways — by supplier, by guide, by restaurant. Each pass raises one order per party, so a group sleeping twice at the same Cairo hotel gets a single order carrying both stays.
What comes back is deliberately a skeleton: one line per booking, quantity 1, the correct party, and no price at all, because the tour never held one to give. Pricing is yours, and it belongs on the order — two hundred room-nights at 45, five guide days at 300.
The tour’s term decides which passes run: each names the book and term its orders take, and a pass with neither is skipped — that is how an agency that never buys guiding separately keeps guide orders off. Accommodation and flight lines name no service of their own, so the term supplies a Hotel Service and a Flight Service to stand in. Press the button again once the itinerary has settled and the orders are refreshed against the tour as it then stands.
The priceable unit, and where margin appears
Every line of every travel document, bought or sold, names one tour service — an arrival transfer for up to fifteen pax, a single-room supplement per night, a domestic economy leg. That is the smallest thing the module can put a price on, and where the accounting is decided: a line’s tax treatment comes from the service, not from the party or the header, and when a term takes its cost account “from the item”, the item is the tour service.
Documents carry forward through From Document, which copies the account party, the money block and every line into the one you are writing — order to invoice, invoice to return. On the revenue side the travel service sales invoice bills the agent, an ordinary customer record.
So cost accumulates against the hotel, the restaurant and the guide by name, and revenue against the agent. The margin on that group is the difference between two sets of documents that both point back at the same tour — a moment to read rather than a week to assemble.
