Bookings and invoicing

For: Agents Where to find it: Sidebar → Bookings (operations) and Finance (money) · Finance → 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 from "requested" to "confirmed", 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. Anyone with the Bookings permission works the trip; the Finance permission is a separate trust boundary for the money side (receipts, invoices, the VAT report).

What it does

Bookings. A converted quote becomes a booking with a B-YYYY-n reference. Each priced service from the quote carries across; you tick each one from requested → held → confirmed as suppliers come back to you. Optional lines the client never agreed to buy do not carry across.
Client documents. Proformas, tax invoices and (later) credit notes, raised against a booking and rendered as branded PDFs, using the same branding as your quotes.
Receipts and allocations. 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 ledger — a human, one-click review, never an automatic post.
A VAT report. Recognised revenue and output VAT per month, per currency, per brand — read straight from the ledger, so it is right even for a booking that never had a tax invoice printed.

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 → Accounting settings (you can also answer it during guided setup, on the Quote to Book step). There are two policies:

Recognise at checkout (`on_checkout`)

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 — a liability on your books, not income.
On the trip's checkout date (the last service end date), the whole trip's revenue and VAT are recognised in one event, with no client-facing document, and the deposits you were holding are reclassified from held funds to income.
A tax invoice can still be produced on demand afterwards, from those recognised figures — it prints nothing new to the ledger; it just re-states what was recognised.

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

Recognise on confirmation (`on_confirmation`)

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. Until that first booking, an owner can still change it (it is an owner-only, audited, forward-only change that never rewrites an existing booking). 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, invoice footer — can be changed at any time; only the recognition policy locks.

The finance review queue — your runbook

Under Recognise at checkout, revenue is not recognised automatically. A nightly sweep adds each booking that is due (its checkout date has passed) to the recognition queue as a pending row. Recognising is where real, irreversible money moves, so it is always a person's decision:

Open Finance → Recognition queue. Each pending row previews the figures live — net, VAT, gross, deposits already held, and the balance still receivable.
Check the booking is actually complete — the figures are computed 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 post the single recognition entry to the ledger and flip the row to confirmed. This is not reversible except by a correcting entry — confirm deliberately.
If a booking should not be recognised (cancelled, disputed), Dismiss it with a reason. Dismissing posts nothing.

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

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

Receipts, proformas and what the client sees

Record each client payment as a receipt against the booking, then allocate it to the document(s) it settles. A receipt can sit unallocated (money on account); a refund is a negative receipt.
Allocations must be in the same currency as the document — Tourium does not do currency conversion on allocation.
Under Recognise at checkout, allocating a receipt to a proforma just marks the proforma paid; it moves nothing in the ledger, because the ledger entry belongs to the receipt itself.

Zero-rating and place of supply

Many SA inbound services are zero-rated. Tourium handles this today as a per-line tax rate — a line set to 0% is a zero-rated line — rather than an automatic place-of-supply engine. Set the line rate when a service is zero-rated; a full rules engine is a later addition.

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 (coming) or a manual journal.
Multi-currency. Every ledger entry is tagged with the booking's sell currency, and reports group by currency and never sum across currencies.
Amendments and cancellations. Edit freely before recognition; refunds go through as negative receipts. Cancellation-fee handling beyond that is a later phase.

Quote to Book — build and send the quote a booking is converted from.
CRM — a booking milestone advances the lead's pipeline stage automatically.