Wakanow.com Travels is one of the fastest growing travel agency in Nigeria. As at when I updated this post, the company had just announced their official presence in Kenya and the UK, a move it embarked on to provide exceptional local travel packages to her growing customers in these countries.
Wakanow started 8 years and has since grown to become a successful travel and tour startup in Africa. The company’s travel and booking platform are connected to Amadeus – the world’s biggest internal and local reservation system.
Wakanow offers GDS and non-GDS booking services; you can book travel via the company’s website directly from Amadeus and pay using a debit or credit card or walk into Wakanow travel centres to make a booking and pay cash.
Before the news about Kenya and the UK office opening, the company’s management approached my former company for QuickBooks with a detailed request on what their expectations were.
Here are some of the requirements:
- A real-time integration of Amadeus ticket booking platform with QuickBooks software so that we a customer book a local or international travel ticket, relevant information on the ticket like customer’s name, travel destination, the amount paid, tax charges, airfare charges and commission earned are directly fed into the appropriate account heads in QuickBooks. The reason this need is vital is that the company websites receive huge traffic and a good number of visitors convert in sales which couldn;t be treated manually.
- Also, for tickets voided and cancelled, the system should save them in a folder for reference purpose.
- The QuickBooks company file, even though it’s a desktop software. should be on the cloud so that users in Nigeria, Kenya and the UK can easily access the central data file from their PCs and enter non-GDS transactions; walk in travellers.
- Some customers pay for flight booking on foreign currency so the setup should also track foreign currency transactions and report the sales in home currency using an updated exchange rate. Any gain or loss on transactions should also be accounted for.
Read Integrate Amadeus platform with QuickBooks to see how we implemented the ticket booking platform.
For cloud access, I installed QuickBooks on one of the users’ system and saved the company data file on a cloud folder (dedicated IP), created username and password for the users in Kenya, Nigeria and the UK. Whenever they want to enter transactions, all they need to do is launch the software, open an existing company, select the central file on the cloud and log in remotely.
If you need a clarification on how we can implement a real-time flight ticket booking transaction import in QuickBooks for your travel company, send a mail to info@accountingsoftware.com.ng