According to your payment terms, some clients might be required to pay a deposit upfront. This is generally set up as part of a Payment Plan. It is important that the upfront payments, or deposits are tracked correctly as this directly affects your cash flow and debtors.

Deposits/payments due are usually tracked using the Payments Due report.

Payments Due Report

To find this report in your system navigate to Financials > Reports > Payments Due. This report presents details of payments outstanding. It is designed to serve two purposes:

1. To provide a form of statement of amounts due.
2. To provide a guide for expected collections over a specified period.

You could use this report to generate a list of all payments due for reservations before they are due to travel.

An example would be to generate a weekly report to see all payments due to the end of the current month (31st), for all traveling in the next 3 months.

Chasing Payments Due

Once you’ve generated the Payments Due report, you can email the agent directly from the Report to advise them of their outstanding payment. Let’s have a look at how this is done.

1. Generate the Payment Due report as required. Use your report filters to define your report parameters. You can search for outstanding payments for a particular agent, particular Payment plan, or even per consultant.

TIP: The consultant filter is handy to have if the individual reservation consultants in your office are responsible to chase the payments for the reservations they created.

The example below shows how the user defined their report filters to search for all payments due from the agent, Coco De Mer Travel, to 31 March 2017 for reservations using the “Month Before Arrival” payment plan.