One of the biggest challenges facing travel agents in Nigeria is how they can easily track their daily airline ticket sales to customers – both domestic and international flight bookings. At times, there could be issues on how to handle flight tickets that were cancelled, voided and refunded which is also critical to ascertaining overall ticket sales for the day. This is a big issue that has, over the years, called for a lasting technical solution.
In this review, I will be sharing tips on how we built an application that import all transactions from Amadeus Air file into QuickBooks ( available for all versions without restriction to a specific year) with all relevant parameters extracted from the tickets.
Understanding what Amadeus air ticket is:
Before we initiate the process of building the software, the need to have a proper understand of how the airline ticket file is not just number one but very critical to ensuring we feed the right information into QuickBooks.
This is a sample copy of an air file:
Here are some of the basic parameters extracted from the ticket file:
- Air file number, to help us trace a ticket.
- Ticket type – local or international booking.
- Air passengers name including email address.
- Ticket number that not only identifies the specific ticket booked but is not repeated elsewhere.
- Destination
- Ticket cost, including the amount payable to airline and tax charges.
- Commission percentage, stated on the ticket.
Once these parameters have been extracted, we went on to build a background application that reads the ticket, extracts the relevant parameters and feed into QuickBooks as shown below:
The invoice above depicts how a typical transaction import from Amadeus ticket feed the relevant parameters into QuickBooks without a manual intervention.
The second entry to this is the cost of sales portion of the ticket deductible from the sales to arrive at the actual earnings, also known as commission, on each ticket.
On receipt of payment from each customer via the “Receive Payment” window, QuickBooks matches the invoice issued to the amount remitted using the customers’ name. We have also gone ahead to build an application that imports your bank statement into QuickBooks, to speed up all payments on pending invoices and reconcile your books.
