“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.
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