Store contact information, rate information and inventory detail for the vendors with which you do business.
In many ways, the Vendor module is at the very heart of TourTools™. The Price/Inventory Records created here are the elements that are ultimately bundled into the Packages being sold, thereby creating receivables. And, each of those Package elements has a corresponding Operations record, where Bookings meet services sold, thereby creating payables.
Creating a New Vendor
To create a new vendor, click on the New button at the top of your screen.
Entry Screen
A new, blank record appears. Most of the fields are obvious as to the detail you will enter. Note that it is not necessary to enter a city and state; rather, enter the zip and those fields will “auto-fill”. Select the “Type of Vendor” and the “Service Category” from value lists that present. These lists are stored in the Support File called “Value Lists” on the Main Menu.
Next, select the Default Currency, the currency the Vendor is to be paid in. In this example, the Fairmont Lodge in Jasper will be paid in Canadian Dollars. Ultimately, the value of any services purchased from this supplier will convert, based at the exchange rate you establish, into U.S. dollars as part of the Package pricing exercise.
To create a new currency and/or establish exchange rates, click on the ‘Go to Currency” button, which will take you to the Currency records.
To create a new record, click New and name your currency. Begin loading the record by filling in the (dark) green field at the top. The amount loaded here, as can be seen, is what one US Dollar will purchase in the foreign currency. Once that field is loaded, the lighter green field below will auto-fill with the “inverse” value of the currency, or, what one currency unit will cost in US Dollars. Take that number, rounded if you wish, and load it in the (dark) yellow field at the top of the screen. The inverse of that amount will auto-load to the lighter yellow field below.
The last, and probably most important, field you will complete is the white one, labeled “Costing”. The figure entered here is what will be used to convert the cost of services loaded for pricing in Packages, and may be the same or different than what has been calculated and reflected in the bright yellow at the top of the layout. You may want to allow some “wiggle room” in case there is a fluctuation in the currency exchange rate by the time your tour operates, as was done in this example. In this scenario, the exchange rate could change by almost three cents in the hotel’s favor before the costing of the trip would be in trouble. Conversely, if the exchange rate improves by the time we have to pay the hotel, we will make a bit more on the Package than when the cost was first estimated.
When all of your input is complete, click on the “Post Update Note” which will record who updated the rate and on what date.
More specifics on currency exchanges as they relate to costing tours and making payments are covered in the Packages and Ops chapter.
At the lower part of the “Entry” screen, you see a section referenced “Tours on Which This Vendor is Being Used.” Nothing will appear here until Price/Inventory records from this Vendor are used in Packages, and Operations record are created.
Billing Address Screen
In situations where the physical address of and contact information for the Vendor is different from what you use when contracting service, use this screen to load the alternate information. An example might be the Westin Hotel in Halifax that you actually contract via the Westin sales office in Chicago. On the Billing Address section, load the details for your contact in Chicago. If the service address and the billing address are the same, you do not have to enter any information on this screen.
Select the address to which mail should be sent by clicking on the appropriate “Send Mail To” button.
The Taxpayer ID field (to the left of the Send Mail To field) is optional. You may enter this vendor’s Taxpayer ID in this field for your reference.
Notes Screen
This is one of many spots where you can enter “notes” that become part of printed documents later on. On this screen, the field labels give an indication of which notes appear on what documents.
You may wish to enter colorful marketing copy into the Proposal Notes and Itinerary Notes fields. This will appear on proposals and itineraries, letting the client or traveler know what they will be doing, and help get them excited about that destination or attraction.
In the Escort Notes field, common entries include information that your escort should be aware of like restaurant hours, the fact that the hotel likes to welcome the group on the bus upon arrival, etc.
In the Drivers Notes field you might touch on where passengers should be dropped and where parking is available.
Notes made in the Follow Up Comments field are strictly for internal use. You might want to note how much time to allow for touring for an attraction or that only a certain room type is acceptable at a particular hotel property.
At the end of this manual, there is a complete section dedicated to notes; where they originate, how they can be edited, etc.
Activity/To Do Screen
(We’re intentionally skipping over the Product & Prices tab; we’ll get back to that in a minute). The only field that requires your attention on this screen is the “Product Type”. This is a value list that you can use as suits your situation. You can set your values to reference the geographic location of the vendor, the type of tour that this vendor is used on, or any number of other things. Be aware that this same value list is also used in the Tour Master database. As an example, the vendor is a hotel located in San Antonio and you primarily use it on your tours to the southwest, one of which is called “The Great Southwest”. You might elect to classify this “product type” as “Southwest USA” or “The Great Southwest”. When it came time to actually create a tour for a southwest destination or specifically create “The Great Southwest” tour, the classification you used for the hotel will probably be the same one you pick to classify the tour.
The bottom half of the screen is where you begin to create or can see a list of any “To Do” or “Activity” records that have been created. For details on creating and managing these records, see Chapter 9.
Product & Prices Screen
The loading of services you have contracted with your suppliers begins here, but before proceeding, it may be helpful to look at the process in terms of a “flow chart”. At the top of the chart is your Vendor, from which you purchase a variety of products grouped in a Product Date Record, each of which is referred to as Price/Inventory Record.
The Date Begin and Date End fields define the period of time during which the specific product is available. The range may be as long as a year or may reflect seasonality.
In our example, we have created a “container” as it were, in which we will load all of our room blocks and meals at Hotel Washington for anytime during the year 2006.
The Category description is essential to the “Tour Duplicate” function available in Tour Master working properly. Details on that process will be explained in the Tour Master chapter. At this juncture, the important thing to know is that if you have multiple Product Date Records whose dates overlap even by a single day, it is critical that they be assigned different categories.
If the Price/Inventory records you are about to create are “generic”—perhaps the costs are estimated and you do not actually have the service contracted with the supplier—and are needed only for purposes of being able to put together a proposal, you will want to click on the “Proposal Only” button. Doing so will prevent them from being mistaken for the “real thing” and accidentally used in actual packages.
Click on the Continue button to proceed as you are in the middle of a script.
Inventory & Pricing Data Screen
You are now at the point where, within the parameters of this Product Date Record, you can create a Price/Inventory record. To start, click on the “New” button. For now, ignore what appears at the top left part of your screen referencing the Current Tour# and Package#. Initially, this has nothing to do with the record you are creating. At the point the record is being attached to a Package, the information that displays will be relevant.
Do note the field labeled “Destination (Internal)”. A value list of all the city and state combinations in use here in Vendor has automatically generated and appears here, and your choice will usually be the city and state where the Vendor is located. Looking ahead, this assignment becomes useful later when you link Vendor services to a Package (as one of the ways you can select the Vendor whose service you want to link is to pick by “Destination”—explained in greater detail in the Package chapter). When you might type or select a different value is when the Vendor, let’s say a hotel in Alexandria, VA, is being used in connection with a Package actually bound for Washington, DC. In such a case, you would label the “Destination” as being Washington, DC, not Alexandria. A good rule of thumb is to think in terms of this field as being an “in connection with” pointer .
Looking, then, at the bottom part of the layout where we are building the Price/Inventory record, the Name & Description, as you’ll note, is “external” and is what will appear on proposals and also itineraries. If you are creating a “Proposal Only” record, you might want to get in the habit of prefacing your description with the word “Proposed …”; another measure that will help avoid the accidental “misuse” of the record.
The Cost Type field will autoload as F, P or R (per person, fixed or room) as soon as you enter data in the respective cost fields. If you create records that initially do not have costs loaded, you will want to set this field manually.
The Start Date and End Date will initially auto-load as the dates assigned in your Product Date record, but can be overtyped as has been done in the example. For services like a theme park admission that remains constant all year, the year-long date range would be applicable. For a tour-related motorcoach charter, your date range will be as long as the tour. In the case of hotel accommodations, you have two choices. One is to create one record for each overnight; the other is to set up a date range, with the Start Date being the date of check in, and the End Date being the date of check out, as has been done in our example. The biggest factor that should drive your decision is…will every member of the traveling party be with the group every night, or does the possibility exist that some will miss a night due to late arrival or early departure? If you want to be able to eventually generate a separate roomlist for each night of the stay and not have to make any manual adjustments to the payable created for the hotel in Ops, then you will create a separate Price/Inventory record for each overnight.
The Type Service will also auto-load and will be the same as what you used to classify the Vendor. The same value list is attached to the field and you may, if you wish, re-classify the record. By example, if you are creating a record representing dinner at Hotel Washington, you might change the Type Service from “Hotel” to “Dinner” or “Meals”.
In cases where your service has a specific start and/or end time—a theater performance or restaurant reservation, by example—you will want to fill in the Time Begin and Time End fields.
Note that the system is again assigning “ID numbers” to the records that you are creating. The Vendor has a number, as seen above.
The Product Date Record also has an assigned number (see right)…
…as does the Price/Inventory record (see below).
If you want to manage inventory for the service here in Vendor, you will click Inv On. Doing so necessitates that you then load a figure representing the quantity on hand on the Room or Per Person tabs. In this case, since we are talking about rooms, we loaded 3 (rooms) in the # Sing field and 22 in the #Dbl. Please note that inventory can be controlled for a daily service, an overnight service or for a “stay”. You cannot set up a date range (for example) January 1, 2006 through December 31, 2006 and expect to manage the inventory for each day. Instead, you must create a separate Price/Inventory record for each day with its own cost and inventory (easy to do using the Dupe feature, which we will discuss later).
If it is not necessary to manage inventory—for a service like shuttle vouchers, by example—you will leave inventory turned off.
The button just below, Omit on Itin?, signals the program to not list the service in an itinerary. Items like a per-diem allowance for your tour manager’s on-the-road expenses would likely be treated this way. The cost for that service needs be included in your Package for pricing, but should not show up as a “line item” in the documents your client or passenger receives.
As mentioned earlier, there are three kinds of costs that you can manage in TourTools™. They are Fixed, Per Person, and Room. Fixed costs are those that will be shared by the entire group. Some examples are a motorcoach or tour manager wages. Per person costs are fairly obvious; anything like a meal or a theatre ticket that will be charged on a per-person basis falls into this category. Finally, anything that has a room component to it—hotel rooms or cabins on a ship—will be loaded as Room costs. Only one type of cost should be loaded in a single record. To elaborate on each a bit more:
Fixed Costs
Using a motorcoach charter as an example and moving across the fields of entry from left to right, the Fixed Inv field is where you can input the number of busses you might have chartered for a particular tour, if you have turned inventory on. To accommodate the cost, you can use either the FX Group Cost field or the Group Cost/Daily field. The difference between the two is as follows:
Example
You have contracted with a motorcoach company for an over-the-road charter for the period January 1 to 7, 2007. The cost for the week will be $5,500. You will load that amount as a FX Group Cost, associated with a Begin Date of January 1 and an End Date of the 7th. You could possibly turn inventory “on”.
From the same company, you contract shuttle services on a daily basis quite frequently throughout the season. One airport-to-hotel trip costs $250, which amount you will load as a Group Cost/Daily. The date range for this record might be January 1 through December 31, which implies that you can pull this service into any number of packages, so long as the date of usage falls between January 1st and December 31st. Because such a record is “generic”, inasmuch as you haven’t really contracted a shuttle a day for the 365 days of the year, you would turn inventory “off”.
Note: When it comes to fixed costs, turning inventory “on” and loading a number in the Fixed Inv field is really for reference only since inventory is not controlled in the same way that it is for per-person or room expenses. By example, were you to load the January charter into one Package, there’s nothing to stop your pulling the same charter into a second or a third. This is different than the control that is in place when you, by example, inventory a theatre ticket (per person) at 50 for a certain performance, and are stopped from booking a 51st passenger on any package that includes the service.
The last field on the line references Capacity. For the charter service used in the example, you might load 45 as being the number of seats on the bus. Again, this is for reference only since there’s nothing to alert you when you book more passengers than that on the tour using the charter.
Per Person Costs:
Using theater tickets as an example, your Begin and End Dates would be the same and you may want to load the starting time of the play in the Time Begin field and the approximate end time in the Time End field. Inventory would be turned “on”, and the number of tickets you are holding would be entered in the PP Inv field. As mentioned above, if you have a block of 35 tickets, at the point you tried to sell a 36th person on the Package featuring this service the booking would waitlist.
As bookings are made on Packages using the service, the inventory will decrement and you will see the quantity still available in the Avail field.
If complimentary tickets based on sales will accrue to you from the Vendor, enter the number and the level at which you will receive them in the #Comps and Level fields. If, by example, you will earn one free ticket for every 40 sold, your entry will be 1 and 40. If you have a situation where you will earn a free ticket regardless of whether you sell 4 or 40, you will simply enter 1 in the #Comps field and nothing in the Level field.
Room Costs
Referring to the example used at the beginning of this section, you will use the RM section when loading inventory and costs relating to the reservation of rooms with a hotel or cabins with a cruise line. Note that your End Date will always be the date of check out, so at the very least, (as in the case of a single overnight) all of your records will have a one day difference in the Begin and End fields. In the Inv fields, you will load the number of single and double rooms booked, if you have checked “Inv On”.
The next four fields are for input of the single, double, triple and quad room costs. In the “Tax” field, load a decimal figure representing the tax rate, if applicable. In the field labeled “Bags”, load the per-person cost for baggage handling (obviously, if you create separate records for each individual night, only one should contain the baggage handling fee; or, consider the possibility of creating a Price/Inventory for just the cost of porterage) . The last field, “Occ. Tax”, is where you will load a dollar amount representing the occupancy tax on the room, if applicable.
On the next line, to the left, is where you identify the “billing structure”. You’ll note the choices are to bill per person or per room, and per night or per stay. Further to the right is a field to indicate the #Comps and Level. Your input here should be indicative of how many rooms will be comped for how many rooms sold.
If the hotel quotes a flat rate for a room on single or double occupancy, and quotes the cost for triple or quad occupancy by giving an “extra bed” cost, that cost will go in the field labeled “Xtr Bed”.
Finally, if you are responsible for the cost of the driver’s room on tour, and the hotel offers a special rate for same, enter the amount in the last field, “Drvr RM Rate”.
Note: When the “extra bed” or “driver room” rates are considered for pricing in Package, they will be subject to the same tax rate as indicated in the line above, so both entries should be net amounts. Also, when you specify that the costs are “per stay”, the occupancy tax should likewise be for the stay, as should the cost for the extra bed and the driver’s room. In the example that follows, our entries are $20 for the occupancy tax, which implies a $4 per night charge.
► IMPORTANT: If this item is an airfare, your input is entirely different than anything indicated above. Skip to the next section for detailed information as to how to handle flight segments and costs.
Very important: Keep in mind that it’s possible to load flight itineraries directly in Bookings on a individual basis, based on which you will be able to produce detailed departure and arrival manifests. The method described here makes sense only when the entire group is using the same air, no deviations, and there will be no need for a manifest.
Flight Segments
It is possible to create complete flight itineraries with airfares in TourTools™. Before doing so, you will want to load your airline and airport city codes by going to the Airport Codes support file. As always, check to see if what you need already exists. If not, click on the “New” button to proceed. The layout you use is the same whether you’re loading an air carrier or an airport city.
City codes should be entered in the top half of the screen, and air carriers are loaded at the bottom. In the notes section to the right, you can indicate the gateway cities that the airline serves (or remark about anything else you might want to).
When building a Price/Inventory record to reflect an air schedule, your Vendor’s Type Service must be “Air”. Start by clicking on—within a new Price/Inventory record—the “FLTS” button.
The screen you access looks like this and the fields are fairly self-evident. The data you enter in the Carrier Code, Dept Arprt and Arr Arprt fields will pull the carrier name and cities of departure and return if they exist. If they don’t, go back to the support file and create what you need (or double check the spelling of what’s already there).
If the flight being loaded crosses an international date line, you will make an entry in the Date Offset field. The entry can be a positive or a negative, whichever is appropriate.
For schedules with multiple legs, after loading the first, continue to the second record and load the next segment, and so on. It is a good idea to load the outbound and the return schedule in separate records. That way, when you create your Package, you can attach the outbound schedule on the departure date, and the return schedule on the return date. It is suggested that the total fare be loaded in your first segment.
Example
Our tour will include air transportation between Grand Rapids and Honolulu. As shown, our first entry is for the Grand Rapids to Chicago connection, and the complete fare has been loaded.
The second portal record contains the continuation from Chicago to Honolulu.
When you have finished, click on the Continue button. You will be asked if you want to update the price and description. Answering “OK” will load the date, the times, and the fare. You will need to add a description. Note that above the FLTs button, the number of segments loaded in the flight record will display.
Dupe Button
The Dupe button will save you an immeasurable amount of time in setting up records that are similar or identical to records that already exist. This function works only in cases where the Price/Inventory record being copied is a single-day service whose begin and end dates are the same, or a service where the end date is a day later than the begin.
To use, position yourself within the record you want to copy, and click on the Dupe button. You will be asked whether you want to make a single copy of the record or if you want to replicate a range. If you choose the first, an exact duplicate of the original record will be created, the dates of which you will need to alter. If you pick the latter, the screen at the top of the next page will present.
In the center of the layout, you will see a representation of your Product Date Record description and its date range. To the right of that is a reconfirmation of the description and the date of the Price/Inventory record you are copying.
Initially, the white fields to the left will display, in the “first date” field, the day following the service being copied—in this case, August 6th—all the way to the last date of your product date record, December 31st. In this example, the “last date” has been changed instead to August 8th, the check-out date of our last record. When you click on the Continue button in this example, you would end up with two new records, one for an overnight on the 6th and one for the 7th.
The other buttons you see within a Price/Inventory record are:
Attach Button
Clicking on the Attach button allows you to attach Vendor records to Packages. For more detail on this, see Chapter 6.
Notes
It’s possible to—at the Price/Inventory level—type notes unique to just that record. Click on the “Notes” button to review and edit notes typed at the Vendor level. To be sure, any changes made at this level do not affect your original notes.
Detail
Clicking on the Detail button that you find within the Price/Inventory record accesses a three-tabbed layout as follows:
On the Reports tab, you see—on the left—the Vendor name, the description and Start and End Dates of the Price/Inventory record you are in.
On the top right, the field labeled VenElD# references the Price/Inventory record number, the Vendor number is obvious, and the Count Recs field displays the total number of P/I records associated with the Vendor. The fields at the bottom can be used to keep track of details as per the labels.
The Vendor Status List report that can be run from this screen reflects the product description, the begin and end dates, and inventory by category within the parameters that you define (this is basically the same report as the “Tour Element Inventory” report that can be generated from Package and from Bookings).
Use the “Back” button to return to the Price/Inventory record from where you started.
On the Edit tab, specifics of the Price/Inventory record are reconfirmed and under the heading “Package Elements Linked Records” you can see which Package(s) this record has been attached to. The lower section of the screen references the Operations records that are linked to the Price/Inventory record.
The last tab, List View, allows you to view a list of all records you have assembled.
If you have any questions that are not answered here Contact TourTools Support for assistance.
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