Technology Report

TRAVELOG finance and support manager Sharon Auguste dates the development of her company's travel agency mid-back office system back to 1985.

She says its purpose then was "to bridge the gap for travel agencies from tedious manual accounting processes, hordes of paper wastage and mundane reconciliations to an automated system which not only assisted the owners and managers to view the position of their company for future planning, but also to assist accountants and auditors with end of year processes to maintain a client/trust account to meet the TCF financial criteria".

She said Australian and New Zealand agents needed a reliable travel accounting system because travel was so unique that standard accounting principles did not apply.

She claimed: "Travelog then came to the aid of travel agencies retail, corporate and wholesale alike, and has been the longest and most reliable integrated mid-back office accounting system with a seamless export/import interface as it backs onto the major reservation systems Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo and Abacus."

A Travelog statements claims it is "the only system with dedicated client trust accounts, general trading accounts and branch accounting integrated into one complete system to produce a full set of financials eg. general ledger trial balance, profit an loss and balance sheet, accurate subsidiary ledger reports to all control accounts, audit trails for all accounting entries and historical record keeping.

"Thus there is no requirement for third party back office accounting packages (ie. MYOB/QuickBooks etc.) to complete month and year end reconciliations and reports."

"The integration of the system makes it easier for the agency to track commissions, spends and revenue."

"We pride ourselves on our reporting features and functionality with 250 general ledger and sales reports, 50 corporate reports and an up to date GST report."

What about mobile technology?
"Well, at this present stage we believe the security issues out weigh the benefits of using these products," says Travelog.

Although there is a huge demand to go down this path, the economic feasibility to the client is exponential and in most cases travel agencies don't have these extra resources to fund the technology.

At this stage we believe it is much easier and simpler to use the existing infrastructure with the assistance of established programs such as RDP, LogMeln, GoToMeeting or Teamviewer and remote into the office to complete the accounting tasks that are required.

A recent innovation of Travelog is a redevelopment of its program model to be compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8 platforms.

This has made it a better functioning program for those who use terminal servers," said Auguste.

"In addition we are constantly making enhancement and updates to facilite the constant feature changes and additions made by the CRS/GDS's and Microsoft."

"We listen, we learn and we try to implement significant changes to assist and aid our travel agency clients to make our system the best it can be."