Whether you are a tour operator or an agent, the number of transactions that go through your business is disproportionate to the profit margin on each transaction. Most businesses work on a gross profit margin of 20-40% and with the cut price competition in the travel business we all know that spending a great deal of money on accounting and record keeping is not a luxury that a travel company can afford.!

Bearing this in mind we took a look at all the accounting packages that are available that were multi-user multi- currency and within a price range of £2000-£4000 with a view to integrating a well known accounting system to the front office of Talisman.

Well .. the only way to have total control over those multitude of transactions  in the front office is to integrate them with an accounting system. This means that any transactions done by a front office staff member will automatically be passed to a conventional set of accounting ledgers ..i.e. Sales Purchase and Nominal.

This is so important because the Travel is the only industry which allows any member of staff to pick up a telephone or access a computer and commit your company to liability without an order number or any authority to do so. Just on that premise alone it is important to record all transactions in an accounting system as it happens.

There are many other advantages such as using your front office staff to collect debts before travel date, study the statistics produced by the front office section of the accounting and be fully informed about their performance day by day.. and most of all your accounts person does not have the tedious job of keying in sales invoices, receipts, payments to suppliers etc because this is all done by the integration process. And now... especially  in these days of E-Commerce and trading on the worldwide web   an integrated accounting system is all important to cope with all those web bookings that your customers will do with you. (Talisman has a fully integrated web booking system)

All the accounting packages in the market were to do with buying and selling goods and were geared up to a stock control system. We needed a cash book which would record a sale, cost of sale, and the profit in one entry.

Yes.. in one entry... When you collect a balance from your client the money will be banked as a receipt in your cash book but this balance has all the ingredients of cost and your profit which can be captured and posted to the ledgers in one entry.

This is Talisman accounting... and we wrote this system ourselves and integrated it to the front office to give you all the controls you need  and save you the hassle of reading  your figures on a historical basis.