Bookings and invoicing

For: Agents Where to find it: Sidebar → Quotes → Bookings (operations) and Finance (money) · Finance → Settings → Accounting settings to set your VAT basis

Once a client accepts a quote, you turn it into a booking — the trip you actually operate and get paid for. The booking carries the frozen prices from the accepted quote, tracks each supplier service until the supplier confirms it, and is the thing your client documents and payments hang off.

Bookings and Finance ride on Quote to Book — there is no separate add-on to buy, and neither needs a seat. The operational side and the money side are deliberately separate permissions, so the person who confirms a lodge does not automatically see (or move) the client's money. See Who needs what.

What it does

Bookings. A converted quote becomes a booking with a B-YYYY-n reference. Each priced service from the quote carries across, and you track each one with its supplier — from requested, through a provisional hold, to confirmed. Optional lines the client never agreed to buy do not carry across.
Supplier paperwork. Request a service from a supplier, send vouchers, and produce a voucher pack or rooming list straight from the booking. See Booking documents.
Client documents. Proformas, tax invoices and credit notes, raised against a booking and rendered as branded PDFs, using the same branding as your quotes.
Payments. Record money the client pays, allocate it against the documents it settles, and see what is still outstanding per booking.
The recognition queue. The one place where revenue and VAT are actually recognised in your books — a human, one-click review, never an automatic post.
A VAT report. Laid out in VAT201 order, read straight from your books, so it is right even for a booking that never had a tax invoice printed.
Paying suppliers. Supplier invoices, payments, payment runs, remittance advices and statements. See Paying suppliers.

Where things are

Bookings sits in the sidebar under Quotes. The Finance group holds everything else:

Sidebar item	What it's for
Payments	Every booking with what the client has paid and still owes, plus every client payment. Your day-to-day finance screen.
Recognition queue	Bookings ready to have their revenue and VAT recognised.
Payables → Supplier invoices, Supplier payments, Payment runs, Supplier statements	Money you owe and pay suppliers — see Paying suppliers.
VAT → VAT report, Blended VAT	Your VAT return figures, and checking estimated VAT against what suppliers actually billed.
Settings → Accounting settings, Supplier tax defaults, Supplier payment defaults	Set once, revisited rarely.

Choosing how you recognise revenue and VAT

This is the one decision you must make before your first booking, and it is set in Finance → Settings → Accounting settings (you can also answer it during guided setup, on the Quote to Book step). There are two policies:

At checkout — clients only see proformas

The model most South African inbound operators use with their accountant.

Your clients only ever receive proformas. A proforma carries "This is not a tax invoice" and shows no VAT breakdown.
Money a client pays before the trip is held as a deposit — money you owe back until the trip happens, not income.
On the trip's checkout date (the last service end date), the booking joins the recognition queue. When finance confirms it, the whole trip's revenue and VAT are recognised in one event, with no client-facing document, and the deposits you were holding become income.
A tax invoice can still be produced on demand afterwards, from those recognised figures — see Issuing a tax invoice after recognition.

Choose this if your accountant treats deposits as deferring VAT until the service is delivered.

On confirmation — issue a tax invoice upfront

Conventional upfront invoicing.

A tax invoice is issued the moment a booking is confirmed, and revenue and VAT are recognised then.
Payments you receive allocate straight against that invoice — there is no separate deposit-held stage.

This maps directly onto how standard accounting software handles invoices.

You cannot change your recognition policy after your first booking. It is locked the moment your first booking inherits it, because every booking is stamped with the basis it was raised under and a document reprinted years later must still show that basis. After that, only the organisation owner can change it, and the change applies only to bookings created afterwards — existing bookings, invoices and VAT positions are never rewritten. Get this right with your accountant before you go live. If you never confirm your accounting settings, Tourium will refuse to create your first booking rather than guess — a loud stop, on purpose.

Everything else in accounting settings — your tax rate, VAT registration number, registered company name, payment terms — can be changed at any time; only the recognition policy locks.

Working a booking

Supplier confirmations

Each service on the booking has a confirmation status. Click the confirmation action on a service row (Update supplier confirmation) to move it:

Status	Meaning
Pending	Nothing has gone to the supplier yet.
Requested	You have asked the supplier. Request from supplier sets this for you — see Booking documents.
Provisionally held	The supplier is holding the space until a date. You must enter the Hold expires date.
Waitlisted	The supplier has put you on a waiting list.
Confirmed	The supplier has confirmed. You must enter the Supplier reference — it prints on the voucher.
Cancelled	The service has been cancelled with the supplier. It drops out of the booking's totals.

Confirming a service also records what you now expect to owe that supplier — see Paying suppliers. Cancelling a confirmed service on a booking that has not been recognised reverses that expected cost again. Once a booking's revenue has been recognised, a service can no longer be cancelled from this screen — reducing recognised revenue needs a credit note.

Holds that are about to expire

A provisional hold shows a badge counting down to its expiry ("Hold expires in 3 days"). Above the Bookings list, a card — "N holds expiring" — lists every hold across your bookings that lapses within the next 7 days, each linking to its booking. The card only appears when something is expiring.

Every night, Tourium checks for holds whose expiry date has passed. A lapsed hold goes back to Pending (not Cancelled — a lapsed option does not mean the service was cancelled, and nothing in your books is touched), and the person who created the booking gets an in-app notification so they can chase the supplier.

VAT on each service line

Every service line carries its own VAT treatment, shown as a badge in the VAT column of the services table:

Treatment	What it means
Standard-rated	VAT is charged at the booking's rate, or at a rate set on that line.
Zero-rated	A taxable supply reported at 0% — for example, a foreign lodge.
Exempt	Not a taxable supply; no VAT, and not reported at 0% either.
Manual (blended)	Someone types the VAT amount for the line; Tourium never calculates it. Used for suppliers whose price mixes VATable and non-VATable parts.

A Manual line with no amount entered shows VAT needed instead. That booking cannot be recognised until finance enters the amount — it shows Needs VAT review in the recognition queue.

New lines take the supplier's default. Set each supplier's usual treatment once in Finance → Settings → Supplier tax defaults (foreign lodges zero-rated, flight suppliers manual, and so on). A supplier with no default is treated as standard-rated.
Adding a service by hand. Add service lets you pick the supplier from a searchable list of your suppliers, so their tax default applies. If the supplier is not there, choose Record by name instead and type the name.
Only finance sets VAT. On the booking page the VAT fields are shown read-only, with "VAT is set by finance, not on this screen." Finance changes them on the booking's VAT review page — reached from the Open the VAT review for this booking link in the service dialog, or from a blocked row in the recognition queue.

Cancelling a booking

Click Cancel booking and give a reason — the reason is required. What happens to the money depends on where the booking is, and the dialog tells you before you confirm:

Not yet recognised — the booking is marked cancelled and nothing is posted.
Recognised, on confirmation (the client holds a tax invoice) — a numbered credit note is automatically issued against that tax invoice, reversing the revenue and VAT. Tourium does not email it: the credit note appears in the booking's Money panel, and you send it to your client from there with Send, like any other document, after checking the recipient and Reply-To.
Recognised, at checkout — the recognition is reversed in your books. No client document is produced.

Cancelling never refunds anyone on its own. Money going back to the client is a separate step — a refund recorded as a negative payment. Cancellation fees are not handled yet.

Money on the booking page

People with Manage finance see a Money panel on the booking page. From it you can:

New proforma — draft a request for payment, then Issue it. Issuing takes the next number from your gap-free series, so it asks you to confirm first; the dialog also says whether issuing posts revenue and VAT (a tax invoice under "on confirmation") or just takes a number (a proforma).
Send a document to the client. The dialog shows the recipient and a Reply to address, which opens on your own email so the client's reply comes to you. Change it to send replies elsewhere; if you clear it, replies still come to you. You tick "I have checked the amount and the address" before it goes — a sent email cannot be recalled. Sends that Tourium makes automatically, with no person behind them, use your organisation's contact email for replies.
Void an issued document. The number stays used and can never be reused. If the document had posted revenue and VAT, voiding reverses that posting.
Credit note — against an issued tax invoice. A numbered credit note reverses the revenue and output VAT; the original invoice stays exactly as the client received it.
Issue tax invoice — on a recognised booking with no tax invoice. See below.
Record payment, allocate it, remove an allocation, or Reverse a payment.

Void, credit note and reverse all ask for a reason — it is stored on the record and is what an auditor reads.

What a proforma or invoice shows

From: your registered company name (on a tax invoice) or brand name, the brand's postal address, contact details and VAT number.
Bill to: the client's name, email and phone. On a booking sold through an agency, also the agency's address and — on a tax invoice — its VAT number (set on the agency in CRM → Agencies).
Payment details: your bank details, with the document number as the payment reference. Shown on proformas and tax invoices, never on credit notes.
Terms: your invoice terms, at the foot.

Bank details and invoice terms are set per brand under Organisation → Brands → Document settings. They are fixed on a document when it is issued, so changing bank later does not change what a client was already sent; a draft always shows your current wording.

Issuing a tax invoice after recognition

On a recognised booking that has no live tax invoice, Issue tax invoice reprints the figures already recognised as a numbered tax invoice. It posts nothing new to your books, and a supply gets one tax invoice — so it can only be done once per booking. The button is on the booking's Money panel and on each booking row in Finance → Payments.

Payments, proformas and what the client sees

Record each client payment against the booking, then allocate it to the document(s) it settles. A payment can sit unallocated (shown as On account); a refund is a negative payment.
Allocations must be in the same currency as the document — Tourium does not do currency conversion on allocation.
Under at checkout, allocating a payment to a proforma just marks the proforma paid; it moves nothing in your books, because the entry belongs to the payment itself.
Reversing a payment keeps the original on record and adds a mirror payment beside it.

Finance → Payments

Payments is where a finance person starts. The top half is a searchable, paginated list of your bookings with checkout date, what is Held (deposits) and what is Outstanding, and on each row: Record payment, Issue tax invoice (when it applies), and a link to the booking. The bottom half lists every client payment with its allocations, and lets you allocate or reverse them.

The recognition queue — your runbook

Under at checkout, revenue is not recognised automatically. A nightly check adds each booking whose checkout date has passed to Finance → Recognition queue. Recognising is where real, irreversible money moves, so it is always a person's decision:

Open the To recognise tab. Each row previews the figures live — net, VAT, gross, and the balance still receivable.
Check the booking is actually complete — the figures are worked out at the moment you confirm, so any amendment, extra service or no-show you recorded after the trip is already reflected. This is the whole point of the human step.
Confirm to recognise the whole trip's revenue and VAT and freeze the booking. Confirmed recognition is final — the only correction afterwards is a reversing entry.
If a booking should not be recognised (a no-show, a cancellation), Dismiss it with a reason. Dismissing posts nothing.

Dismissed bookings move to the Dismissed tab. If one was dismissed by mistake, Put back on queue returns it to To recognise — nothing is posted until someone confirms it.

A row marked Needs VAT review has a Manual line with no VAT amount and cannot be confirmed. Its link ("1 line needs a VAT amount") opens the booking's VAT review page, where finance enters the amount and saves.

A booking can only ever be recognised once — a second confirm is refused and posts nothing.

Under on confirmation, there is no queue: the tax invoice is issued and revenue recognised at the moment you confirm the booking.

The VAT report

Finance → VAT → VAT report shows your figures per month, per currency and per brand, laid out in VAT201 order:

Column	What it is
Standard-rated net	Recognised revenue on standard-rated lines.
Zero-rated net	Recognised revenue on zero-rated lines.
Exempt net	Recognised revenue on exempt lines.
Net	The three added together.
Output VAT	VAT on your sales.
Input VAT	Reclaimable VAT on your costs — from expected supplier costs on confirmed services and from approved supplier invoices.
Net VAT payable	Output VAT less input VAT — the bottom line of the return.
Gross	Net plus output VAT.

Choose the period with From and To (it starts on the calendar year to date; Reset period puts it back). Period totals are shown per currency and never added across currencies. Download CSV gives the same rows with the brand's name, ready for your accountant.

Who needs what

To…	You need
See Bookings in the sidebar, confirm supplier services, edit services and travellers, send supplier requests and vouchers	Quote to Book on your account + Manage bookings
See the Finance group, the Money panel, payments, recognition, VAT and supplier payables	Quote to Book on your account + Manage finance
Open a booking page	Either permission

The two are separate on purpose: confirming a lodge is a consultant's job; handling client money and VAT is not necessarily the same person's.

Finance-only users (Manage finance without Manage bookings) have no Bookings item in the sidebar. They reach a booking from Finance → Payments, and see its services, travellers and documents read-only.
Operations-only users (Manage bookings without Manage finance) do not see the Money panel at all.
A bookkeeper can be a Basic User with only Manage finance ticked. Restricting someone's role like this needs the Team Controls add-on.
Admins on an agent account with Quote to Book get Manage quotes, Manage the CRM, Manage bookings and Manage finance by default, so a new consultant can quote, book and take payment on day one. Owners and Super Admins can do everything.

Good to know

Editing money. You can add, remove and edit services and re-derive totals freely until a booking's revenue is recognised. After recognition the booking's money is frozen; a correction needs a credit note.
Multi-currency. Every entry is tagged with its currency, and reports group by currency and never add across currencies.
Place of supply. Tourium does not work out VAT treatment from where a service happens. Set each supplier's default in Supplier tax defaults, and have finance adjust individual lines on the VAT review page.
Itineraries from a booking. If you also have an Itinerary Builder seat, Generate itinerary on the booking's Services card builds a draft client itinerary from the booking — see Itinerary builder.

Quote to Book — build and send the quote a booking is converted from.
Booking documents — supplier requests, vouchers, voucher packs and rooming lists.
Paying suppliers — supplier invoices, payments, payment runs and statements.
Itinerary builder — turn a booking into a client itinerary.
CRM — a booking milestone advances the lead's pipeline stage automatically.
Team Controls — restrict who can reach bookings and finance.