Tripz Systems Blog

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

I am pleased to announce that we have a brand spanking new Document Management System in Tripz.  Instead of reinventing the wheel and relying on older ways of doing things we are providing you with a modern-style document management system that uses the Internet, or what some call “The Cloud,” for document storage.

Google Docs Integration (click to enlarge)

We have integrated Tripz with Google Docs, the online document and collaboration management system from Google. This is the hottest document system on the planet right now and it allows you to do things that you couldn’t do with older technology. You can create a document, spreadsheet or presentation from within Tripz using Google Apps, save a document as a PDF file and link it to your tour and contact information in Tripz.

You can link a document to:

• A customer contact
• A customer organization
• A group
• A vendor contact
• A vendor organization
• An agent contact
• An agent organization
• A tour

This was a big feature request from existing and prospective customers that we have now fulfilled. So you can now do more work in one place in Tripz and link all of your key documents to the vital tour and contact information you work with everyday.

Cheers,

Kurt
Lead Tripzer

Development on Comps is now complete!

We are currently testing these features and are planning a release very soon so you can all get your hands on them.

You can read my earlier posts to learn more about the automatic functionality of comps in TourBuilder and see screenshots. We also have a bunch of other goodies that I will talk about in my next post.

Cheers,

Kurt
Lead Tripzer

I’m happy to report that we have mostly completed work on the exciting new comps capability in Tripz.

Supplier Comps

We have:

• Added Supplier comps to the existing Client and Host functionality
• Added occupancy to the comp selection so you can actually select different occupancies for the comp calculation
• Added the Supplier Comp Ratio to the Budget screen so you can see what each vendor is providing
• Added the ability to edit the comps right on the screen without having to go into the Edit screen

Comp Totals

We are currently finishing the updates to the reports that use this new functionality and testing. We expect to be able to release this exciting new functionality that many of you have been asking for very soon.

Cheers,

Kurt
Lead Tripzer

The Tripz Development team has been hard at work listening to our clients and cranking out one useful enhancement after another.  We wanted you to have some “treats” this Halloween.

As reported in my last post on October 6th, the next release will be a big one and it will have a lot of good things in it. In addition to the great enhancements in the reseller commission and Canadian GST handling we have been working on Comps, otherwise known as Complimentaries.

These come in three flavours:

1. Complimentary items that you give to client personnel such as tour directors
2. Complimentary items that you provide to your staff like escorts that are working on a tour
3. Complimentary items that your suppliers provide you in return for bringing them a certain volume of passengers

We have completed work on the first two so you will now be able to handle these comps automatically in your tourbuilder quotes.

Client and Host Comps

The first two comps, which we are calling Client and Host Comps, are free for the recipients.  But they are actually extra costs that you incur and
which are totalled and then spread evenly across the costs borne by all of the paying passengers.  You can see these as two new columns on the right on the Tourbuilder costing grid.

These columns are totalled at the bottom so you can see the total comp cost at all times.

Comp Totals

We are currently working on the third and most involved one, Supplier Comps. We should have these done shortly and then we will need a few clients to test the update and give us feedback.  It will allow you to simply indicate whether

Thanks to the power and flexibility of the Tripz v6.1 platform we are able to make really great strides in enhancing the system to handle more of the tedious tasks that you perform every day.  Our goal is to provide you with useful features that will help you reduce your cost of doing business and increase your profitability.

I’ll let you all know as soon as we have something for you to test and see.

Cheers,

Kurt
Lead Tripzer