Month: February 2017

A shopping mall is a large retail complex containing a variety of stores and often restaurants and other merchandise housed in a series of a connected building. It is characterised by a constant influx of customers, parking spaces, segments where similar businesses with operating activities are cited together. For instance, in Nigeria, we have the Ikeja shopping mall where merchandise like ShopRite, chicken republic, Remmy Martins and other retail outlets are situated including Silverbird cinemas.

Managing malls with an accounting software are the best decision a real estate developer or facility manager can take except they are ready to go through the rigorous processes involved managing account documents and generating a financial report.

Here is a guide on what a typical accounting software setup for a facility manager to manage shopping mall will do:

• You can setup each of the segments of the shopping mall by creating a class.
• You can track your customer’s account (retail or wholesale business owners), names, and account receivable balances as at a conversion date.
• A very important part of the shopping mall is facility management, tracking inventories on hand, transfers, sales and purchases.
• You can also track rental income and receivables from different shop owners.
• For service charges paid, and expenses incurred on maintenance, the software has a cheque payment window that records actual amount paid.
• When you receive payment from shop owners as rent renewal or from balance due, the software has a feature that matches actual amount received and invoiced figure.
• For service providers or maintenance fees, the software tracks all payment made to respective contractors from bank accounts.
• You can also set your bank balances up as at the same conversion date selected earlier and reconcile any differences with your bank statement.
• Using the company snapshot, you can view all account balances at a glance, and relevant financial report.

For more inquiries on how to setup an accounting software for your shopping mall, request for a free consultation – 08084219399

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“Amadeus LinkHotel is a multi-GDS services company which distribute your inventory and content to the world’s global distribution systems. GDS or Global Distribution System refers to the reservation tool travel agents use when making an air, hotel, car or other travel service booking.” Source

Most travel agents connect and rely on the Amadeus selling platform to issue local or domestic airline ticket to their customers globally and transactions on it can span from 100-700 air files daily which are equivalent to 3000 – 21,000 air files monthly. The challenge with this platform is that it doesn’t organise your sales record in an easily understandable format.

On several occasions, clients in this airline sector call us to know whether there is a way one can integrate Amadeus airline & ticket reservation software to work with QuickBooks Pro, Premier or Enterprise Edition accounting software so that they can easily cut down hours required to sort tickets, find successful bookings, separate void tickets and cancelled. Initially, we thought this was a straightforward process since most financial software the general export format; CSV, XML or Database. But that is not really the case here, Amadeus GDS reservation system is not straightforward, it’s output file is a notepad and can only be interpreted by a professional airline ticketing agency staff.

Here is how the Amadeus ticket air file looks like in a notepad format:

This is a raw air file that took me few days to interpret; thanks to a staff at our client site who explained what each of the red labels means before my colleague could write a background application that picks all the required parameters and feed into relevant field in QuickBooks invoice.

The key parameters we picked from this ticket are:

• Transaction date
• Airline vendor
• Ticket type; domestic or international ticket
• Airline fare charge (including cost of tickets, and tax charges)
• Commission per ticket based on percentage.
• Ticket number

Here is a typical air file ticket sample we imported from Amadeus GDS into QuickBooks Pro:

• Travel ticket sales: N454, 438
• Base cost of ticket: N279,072
• Total tax charges: N175,366
• Percentage commission: 9%

The following are the transaction entries our applications will run in QuickBooks using the information extracted from the ticket file.

1. For ticket sold to customers, here is how our integration will process the transactions in QuickBooks:

Explanation of each of the labels:

A: This is the customer or passenger’s name

B: This is the ticket number (Air75744)

C: This contains the details of the ticket, international ticket fee and commission earned per ticket

D: This fee covers all tax charges, an amount payable to airline and commission.

E: Total value of the invoice.

The accounting entries:

Cr Income account (Ticket )

Dr Account Receivable

With N454, 438, being the amount receivable from the passenger or customer.

2. Tracking all cost of sales ( ticket issued & tax deductions from invoices figure)

The snapshot above describes how the cost elements of the ticket issued will be tracked:

A: The N429, 321.52 represent the amount payable to the airline: all tax charges plus net ticket cost less commission.

The accounting entries are:

Cr Account payable  (Airline)

Dr Cost of ticket sales

With the N1, 190,009, being cost of sales on ticket booking

3. Viewing the profit or loss report on the ticket issued:

A: This is the invoice figure of N454, 438

B: N429, 321.52 represent the total cost of ticket issue to the customer which comprises both tax charges and the amount payable to the airline.

C: This the gross profit on ticket issue which also doubles as the commission earned per transaction.

4. Apply customer/passenger payments via banking transaction import

Since there are possibilities that the name on a customer/passenger’s ticket (invoice) may be different from what is stated on the bank statement, which could lead to multiple errors like advance payment or pending invoices, we propose that the ticket number will be a reference point when validating an invoice payment.

Here is how the sales transactions from the sample transactions described earlier will be settled in QuickBooks.

The accounting entries:

Dr bank account

Cr Account receivable account

With the N450, 438, being the part payment of ticket fee.

Find a detailed explanation of how the ticket sales transactions imported from Amadeus file will be matched with all relevant receipts into the bank statement via the “Customer Payment Feature”

A: Received From: The system will use the “ticket no” on the payment detail to find and select the customers’ name in this field.

B: This is the most important column we will match your bank transactions with. Here are

• Date: This is the date payment was sent to your bank account
• Number: This is the ticket number that will match with label “B” on the ticket invoicing in “Air75744”. Since no two tickets carry the same number, it’s correct to assume that every payment is attributable to the invoice with the same ticket number.
• Original amount: This is what the customer is expected to pay, as shown by label “E” on the invoice.
• Amount Due: This is the net balance on the customer’s account after making initial or series of payments.
• Payment: This is the actual amount paid into the bank account which is less than the invoiced figure.

For more details on how to integrate Amadeus ticket selling platform with QuickBooks Pro, Premier or Enterprise accounting software, send a mail to info@accountingsoftware.com.ng

Reading is an age long activities we love –  it helps us know more, and learn a specific subject. Do you own a bookstore or bookshop and are looking for the best bookstore inventory and management software for your business? this guide will you understand how we deployed QuickBooks to manage a client’s business, track sales, inventory and generate financial report real time.

Are you a publisher, do you own an online or offline bookstore or bookshop and are looking for the best bookstore inventory and management software for your small or large business? this guide will you understand how we deployed QuickBooks to manage a client’s business, track sales, inventory and generate financial report real time.

One key area bookstore owners are concerned about is how they can accurately monitor their inventories which could be further split into categories – business, management, finance, family, Christian, relationship, technology, etc – They are always too keen to know what their sales figure is, how many books are in each of these sessions, their cost and total value at specific intervals.

Here is how I implemented QuickBooks Pro 2017 for a bookstore:

• I requested a list of account heads and their various balances as at a specific conversion date. These are account receivables, VAT, payables, banks, an organised list of all the books stating the quantity available, cost and their respective sessions, fixed assets, other receivable and payable.
• After confirming that these requirements are available, I installed QuickBooks on their network since they wanted a multi-user setups that will give different staff simultaneous access to the data file.
• The next step is the implementation where I had to bring in all the balances into the software while checking the statement of financial position, also known as the balance sheet, to verify the accuracy of my entries.
• On the stock side, I had to create categories for the book and entered each book by its title and descriptions with their respective cost, selling prices and quantity available in store as the conversion date.
• Other payables like rent owed, utility bills, salaries due for the month and expenses were also entered appropriately.
• Since every business owners are mandated to deduct VAT or sales tax on all sales transactions, payable to relevant tax authorities, I also attached VAT to all product sales during setup for base calculations.
• For the receivable and payable balances, I requested for a breakdown of all customers name, vendor or book suppliers details with the amount expected to be received and paid to these key businesses as the selected date. This will be added together to give you what is generally known as debtors and creditors balance.
• I explored the banking section to record all payment for expenses incurred, track cash deposit from sales made into my client’s bank account, transfer funds from one bank to account and view bank transaction details.
• The type of reports you should see in this type of accounting software implementation for bookstores are profit or loss, balance sheet, cash flow, stock report, sales report, purchases report, petty cash and banking reports which could further be drilled down to daily, weekly or monthly.
• To avoid discrepancies between your QuickBooks balance and bank statement figure, there is a reconciliation window built to track all omitted or missing transactions in either your bank transactions in the book or on the statement as at the end of the month.

If you want to me to set you up on QuickBooks, send a mail to info@accountingsoftware.com.ng

Sometimes this QuickBooks Errors can be confusing if you are not used to this accounting software installations and implementation processes. Two days ago, I was at a clients site to setup QuickBooks Pro in a multi-user environment where each user are in different countries and are expected to access the central data file on the server. They are the most popular travel agency in Nigeria

If you understand the setup, you should know that in such environment, you don’t just go ahead without asking basic questions or else you will be stuck. So, here is what I did;

• I requested for the server capacity or if they have a cloud folder accessible to everyone anywhere, anytime.
• Then, I asked if each user will be working concurrently on a data file; this will help me advise them properly on how many licenses they need to work seamlessly.
• The last is to request for their financial statement as at an agreed conversion date.

After collecting and confirming that these requirements are intact, I quickly started the installation processes which took roughly 20 minutes to conclude – no hitch.

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