Tripz Systems Blog

Archive for the ‘TourBuilder’ Category

Since we built the TourBuilder module several years ago, we’ve been impressed with how it has made life easier for many of you.

However, with success comes the need to continually improve and reinvent if one is to stay on the leading edge. We’ve noticed that a number of you have been working with larger worksheets (>20 items) and this has caused TourBuilder to not work as quickly as you would have liked.

Well we listened and we have delivered.

We have moved all of the automatic functions that were slowing things down to their own button “Update Calculations.”  This means worksheets now load in a fraction of the time they used to.  And it also means that you are no longer bogged down when you are moving around the worksheet making changes on the fly. You simply click on “Update Calculations” when you want to update with the latest changes.

We will be sending out builds for beta testing by key clients. Once we’re happy we have addressed any issues we will include this in the next Tripz release.

Cheers,

Kurt
Chief Tripzer

Today we hit a major milestone just in time for Christmas. We launched Tripz v6.5 to our existing customers.

Christmas is about giving and sharing

This is the culmination of 4 months of hard work by our team to bring a number of core feature enhancements to the Tripz platform. At the highest level we have added:

• Full handling of complimentaries to the Tourbuilding process
• Automatic handling of online agent bookings with commissions, taxes and the production of net rate invoices
• New Business Rules Module for handling complicated tax charging and rebating scenarios in Canada
• Automatic quantity checking for fixed cost items when quoting groups of different sizes
• New Document Management System in Tripz via integration with Google Apps

With this release Tripz is truly becoming an enterprise-class tour management system for the small and medium-sized operator.  You now have a system that can manage all of the key areas of automation. And with the addition of document management and the automatic handling of comps there are substantial cost savings that you will realize by using Tripz.

Consider this as our Christmas gift to our valued clients who have helped us to get where we are today.

Cheers,

Kurt
Lead Tripzer

We’re happy to announce Tripz Version 6.1.0904 released on 09/04/09.

We made the following Enhancements:

1. When adding an item that has a tax code to a Tour Builder worksheet, the tax amount will be automatically selected by default.
2. A Duration column has been added to the Enter Bill screen and the calculations have been enhanced to include this new field.
   

   Duration in Enter Bill

3. You can now use the same item multiple times in Tour Builder.
4. The Single price now displays in the inventory pricing and costing tabs if that is the only price  that exists.
5. The Service Area dropdown field in the Main Inventory Tab now displays all US States and Canadian provinces and allows free-form text entry as well.
6. You can now sort line items in Tour Builder by clicking on the column header.
7. You can now add “Free Sale” and “On Request” items that have a zero quantity to Tour Builder.

We have added a new Detailed Budget Expenses report to Tour Builder.

This will allow you to produce a Cost Sheet in Tripz that is more closely matched to the way most users did it in Excel prior to using Tripz.  It will list out costs, and comps that you provide to clients and extra costs that you have to incur as the tour operator to produce a group tour. It also allows you to include meal options such as FAB, MAP etc.

For our Canadian clients and those who run tours from the US into Canada  it also displays the detailed calculations required for GST including GST Charged, GST Rebated etc.

This report will be included in an upcoming update and it is not in the current live release of Tripz.

We are moving ahead nicely on sales reporting.  One of our good clients who does a lot of group business asked us if we could help them out. They have switched to Tripz but they are still running an old custom-designed system for their forecast reporting because we didn’t have it yet in Tripz.

We were happy to oblige because they’re great people and they always give us great ideas. So I’m happy to announce that as of the 6/30/09 release, we have introduced a new report in two flavours:

• Gross Profit Forecast by Worksheet Creator and
• Gross Profit Forecast by Assigned Agent

New Gross Profit Reports

These are both based on the Tour Builder Worksheets. It essentially let’s you generate a report that totals up all of the business you have sitting out there in quotes and provides a “low” and a “high” forecast.  This is  based on the low # of PAX you have in the quote and the high # of PAX.

You can select whether or not a worksheet should be included in your forecast report to make sure you’re only reporting on the ones you want