Enhance Commissions Reconciliation

Tracking, recovering and reconciling commissions from hotel, car, and other travel suppliers is typically a substantial task for most agencies. TMCs generally take one of two approaches:

1. They manage the process themselves with internal staff.
   Often agencies have employees spending up to 20 hours per week reconciling hotel commissions to bookings and issuing dunning noticed.
2. They hire a third-party company to collect missed commissions on their behalf.
   TMCs spend tens of thousands of dollars on third-party commission collection and they need to monitor and measure the performance of these companies.

CentralCommand eliminates the need to hire a third-party for commission reconciliation and automates much of the process so it is no longer onerous for internal staff. This capability alone represents one of the biggest revenue savings for our customers; it allows them to re-deploy staff to more productive, valuable activities and it increases the accuracy of matching commissions to bookings so more revenue is collected.

How it is Done

CentralCommand imports and reconciles Pegasus and TACS file layouts and uses a sophisticated rules engine to match the commission to the booking. These rules look at a combination of items such as IATA location, check-in date, confirmation code, traveler name, hotel chain, and GDS property code or hotel property name to match hotels. This automation yields both more matches and a higher level of accuracy than a labour-intensive manual process, allowing finance staff to see outstanding commissions at glance. CentralCommand also automatically posts the amounts (less the fee charged by the commission provider) for correct posting to the agent payroll.

Streamlining Check Matching

CentralCommand further streamlines back-office processes by allowing finance staff to scan commission checks they have received into the system, where they are automatically matched to open AR items using the same rules engine as the automated reconciliation process. This relieves hours of tedious work manually matching large numbers of small checks and frees finance staff to work on more important tasks.

Automating Dunning Letters

CentralCommand can automatically create hotel dunning letters from bookings that were interfaced into the system. When a booking is made, CentralCommand travel agency software checks to see if a reservation is commissionable and if a commission amount has been received that matches the booking or if it is still outstanding. Finance staff can download this information into an auto faxing program and using the fax number from the reservation automatically send dunning letters to hotels for all outstanding commissions.