“Traveling an extra mile for your convenience”
Tourism is emerging as one of the biggest human resource absorbing sectors providing millions of job opportunities, investment opportunities, and business avenues for travel agencies. Acting as an intermediary or even one-stop solution for clients, travel agencies have to cater to a large audience on a daily basis along with humongous data management.
Trade experts predict that the travel industry is expected to reach revenue of $1.7 trillion by the year 2022. With such a booming sector, the stakes are often quite high! Despite being one of the largest business domains, travel business owners face several issues on a daily basis. One of them is their recurrent billing and serving a huge client base.
Invoicera was made familiar to the existing conundrum of these travel agencies through one of our clients. They came with several invoicing problems along with challenges to manage their staff, vendors, and clients. Every business tries its best to capture maximum market share in order to extend the best in industry services, but such challenges often render them helpless to overpowering issues.
Here are some of the Travel agency challenges which were presented before us.
Challenge 1: Huge Client Base but no effective management tool
Travel agencies enjoy a huge client base and their business operation runs throughout the year across national borders. The request for the services could be either made online, offline or even through mobile apps. They not only have to manage the data but also make their processes faster for enhances efficiency.
Our client came with the issue of data management wherein, he had to send timely invoices to recurrent clients along with tour package details, currency conversion rate, city tax inclusions and much more on a single platform.
As discussed above, travel agencies serve to a huge client base and sometimes acts as an intermediary between the vendors and customers. Hence separate dedicated portals are required for efficient management.
Solution
Invoicera created an all in one portal for the client which had the following features:
>>>Importable client list into the Invoicera account with relevant details.
>>>Dedicated space for client service for enhanced efficiency.
>>>Issue Purchase Orders which can be converted into Invoices.
>>>The agent can access all the services and bookings done in the past.
>>>Late payment addition, Credit notes were issued if there was an advance payment.
>>>Healthy cash flow through regular payments are done online.
Let us have a Quick View of this Video to know Challenges and its Solution
Challenge 2– Unable to cater to recurrent accounts
Most of the travelers have become smart nowadays and are now fully aware of their packages. Agencies always try to satisfy the needs of their recurrent clients in order to ensure smoother cashflow and better management of the client’s account. Payment management is yet another issue in such scenarios.
As an all-round travel agency, our client had the motive to serve as many requests as they can. Most of their customers were business firms that had frequent travelers along with tourists bookings. In such a scenario, the customers had to be billed on a regular basis.
Solution
This was achieved by setting up an in-house bespoke recurrent billing software which generated invoices on the basis of time conditions. This automated billing software was able to manage the frequency of invoices in order to build a reliable relationship.
The client could also send regular payment reminders and late fees in case of late payments. All the pending, approved and received payments can be tracked through custom reports for better analysis along with acute record-keeping in real-time.
Challenge 3– Adding their charges and taxes to the invoice
The traditional invoices which are generated are subjected to the legal systems of the native country. In such a case, the uncustomized invoices become a mess as they have to customize as per the laws and regulations of the destination country. The taxes, charges, duties, etc have to be added in the invoice beforehand to avoid any trouble upon reaching.
Often times, travel agencies extend their services as a third party in which they act as a medium between the customer and booking agency. In such scenarios, they often have to add their own service charge to the invoice. For example, an agent booked a package from your firm for one of his clients. Hence while giving out the invoice to your agent, you would add your nominal service charge, profits, and relevant taxes too. This could only be done if the agency has to sole authority to edit their invoices.
Solution
We created a self-serving portal for our client wherein every field of the invoice could be edited as per the norms of the agency. They could customize the details which could be added to the invoice, such as taxes, charges and much more to send invoices at a lightning-fast speed.
Challenge 4– Currency and Language barrier
The tourism business is one of the largest growing trends catering to huge market share right from leisure tourists to business professionals. Business tourism is not just about global connectivity but is also seen as a viable income option as well.
Since international tourism is on the rise, hence there is an emerging need to customize our invoices as per the language and currency system of the client’s country. An ineffective system would hamper our client’s ability to target the global market and clientele leaving their customers confused in a foreign local.
If the invoice is created in a language and denomination system local to the client, then it becomes difficult for them to adopt the legacy systems of their destination country.
Solution
In order to bridge this gap, custom invoicing software was created which allowed them to fix this issue.
In order to facilitate their invoicing, the client could now send invoices in the language which was native to their customers. They could choose from a group of international languages for effective communication. Not only this, but they could send their invoices as per the denomination system of the customer’s country.
Invoicera comes with more than 30+ integrated payment gateways, thus receiving or sending money will never be a problem irrespective of their location anywhere in the world. They could even track their payments through filtered tracking and update their invoices in real-time if necessary.
Challenge 5– Tedious Invoicing Process
As discussed above, the travel agency invoices have to be detailed for effective communication. They have to send recurring bills to their regular clients and also have to do regular follow-ups for payments.
In case of late payment, it could lead to an imbalanced account leading to a cash crunch. Hence they again need an efficient expense management tool that could help them in managing their expense reports, financial forecasting and tailor-made reports for effective analysis.
Since our client had an international user base too, hence it was of grave importance to provide a fruitful solution to their predicaments which could have had an adverse impact on their business. Huge staked were in front of us as the software had to be customized completely as per their needs and integrate it into their existing systems. Along with all the challenges, providing them secure data hosting cloud storage was also important to avoid data theft or leakage.
Solution
We created an all in one invoicing software for our client which provided one-stop solutions to them. Invoicera comes with an efficient expense management system that allowed the client to maintain balanced accounts through custom reports. Invoicera also provided 60+ integration into their existing ERP & CRM systems to facilitate smoother workflow
The custom financial reports came in handy for financial forecasting helping them to strategize better for their business. These custom reports could be filtered as per the given attributions, thus simplifying the whole invoicing process and sending lightning-fast invoices in one click.
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EndNote
Invoicera banks upon its 14+ years of experience in this domain, very well knowing what our client wants. The custom billing software made it possible for them to utilize their resources to the maximum along with enhancing their overall productivity.
Invoicera takes pride in providing our clients with an expert software solution in a limited time. Through customized software integrated into their existing legacy systems, Invoicera provided them features like custom billing, client management, recurring billing, expense management, multi-language and currency, payment management, customized invoicing along several others feature with one of the most trusted client service satisfaction.
After some regular follow-ups, the client appreciated our efforts and told us how they have simplified their business process and made it faster almost by 40%. Switch to the best invoicing software appreciated by over 3+ million users worldwide.
