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Invoice

An invoice is normally a document you would send to a customer in order ask for money (and as an official record of the transaction)

We suggest that the basics of an invoice should include:

• Your company information
• The booking reference, invoice date etc
• An invoice number
• The detail on what has been purchased (%itinerary_table_cust%)
• ... and at what price (%summary_sale_table%)

At a very minimum, your invoice would therefore look like this:

Sequential invoice numbers without gaps
In some countries the booking reference (%b_id%) is acceptable to be used as a legal tax reference number. It will be unique in your account. However there are gaps in the sequence (caused by temporary bookings not completed at the end of the booking process).

As a result of these gaps in the booking reference sequence, this means that the booking number is non-compliant with European tax law.

Therefore use the invoice sequence token (%inv_seq%) in conjunction with the booking reference (%b_id%). Each time a document containing the invoice sequence token is generated (for RTF documents only) the sequence is incremented by 1.

Below the document table (within an individual booking) you can see which invoice references have been used on that particular booking - and reissue the invoice (Note that when you reissue this uses the product, prices and invoice template as currently configured - not how was at time of initial generation). The %inv_date_display% token will recall the date from the initial date of issue.

Default invoice format (pre-configured in TourCMS)

Frequently asked questions

How can we invoice to agents in the agent's name but using the lead customer name and address for direct bookings?
There are two solutions to this:

• Create two invoice templates - one designed for use when invoicing agents, one for when invoicing customers. You can therefore create the templates as you wish
• Use the %balance_owedby_name% and %balance_owedby_address% tokens instead of the lead customer details tokens. Then, if the agent owes the balance, the invoice will be created with their name at the top - but if it is a direct booking - then these tokens will return the lead customer details

How would I use %inv_value_sale% ?
Consider you have the following on your invoice:

   Product A      100 GBP
   Product B       50 GBP
   Product C       50 GBP

You will issue an invoice for 200 GBP. This is quite straight forward as the %summary_sale_table% token will produce a table, including sales tax, for the booking.

However, lets say the booking is now adjusted. The customer wishes to book Product D @ 75 GBP. The total invoice now looks as follows:

   Product A      100 GBP
   Product B       50 GBP
   Product C       50 GBP
   Product D       75 GBP

But you don't want to issue an invoice for 275 GBP - just the new 75 GBP. In this situation where a 200 GBP invoice has been previously issued, the %inv_value_sale% token will, on the new invoice, hold the 75 GBP value.

i.e. you can use this token to give a summary of the total booking (%summary_sale_table%) as well as stating that the value of the new invoice is 75 GBP.