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28.1. Booking Agents - Getting Started
Arctic Reservations provides you with the ability to create booking agents, track their bookings, and specify when commissions are earned. It also provides a commission report that allows you to easily track what commissions have been earned, are owed and what balances are due depending on the agent's account settings. The report also allow you to quickly settle the commissions owed to an agent and provide a payment statement to the agents.
There are two methods for creating booking agents, one that allows you to specify specific payment terms for an agent, whether they can skip payment online, and how email confirmations for online bookings should be handled. This method also allows you to specify varying types of commissions per business group that you have in the event an agent's commission varies based on what they book with you. The second method is a simpler method and is primarily used for simply tracking commissions. The second method is only for those agents for whom no special payment terms or varying commission rates exist. The agent is treated like any other guest making a booking with you with the exception that they will earn a commission on the booking. This method is recommended for the agents for whom you only need to track commissions for the bookings they bring to you.
The first method, involves creating agent groups and then individual booking agent records. The second method only needs an individual agent record. As mentioned before, we recommend the first method for primary use with your agents because it allows more flexibility and fine tuning for how your agents are handled in the system.
In the following sections, we will discuss creating agent groups and booking agent records but first let's talk about a couple of settings that you will want to set to tell Arctic when commissions should be paid and what to do when a commission that was paid is related to a cancelled reservation or modified reservation. Both settings are found on the "Settings" page under "Booking Agents". They are the "Calculated Commission Based On" and the "Automatically Reallocate" settings shown here:
The first setting is the "Calculate Commissions Based On" setting. This is where you can specify when commissions should be made available to the agent. You can choose between "Sales", "Payments" or "Accruals". If you choose "Sales", the agent's commission will be available as soon as the booking is made. If you choose, "Payments", the agent's commission will be available once payments have been received towards the booking. If you choose, "Accrual" the agent's commission will be available on the accrual date which is the trip or activity start date. We will discuss how these settings effect the commission reports in further detail in the "Commission Reports" section.
The second setting, the "Automatically Reallocate" setting, allows you to tell Arctic if you want it to reallocate commission payments previously made that are no longer valid based on cancellations or reservation reductions. This setting only effects how commissions are tracked for agents for whom the "Who Pays" is set to the agent. You will learn more about this setting in the "Creating Booking Agents" section.
If you choose "Yes" for this setting, Arctic will apply any commission or part of a commission paid on a previous payment statement for a cancelled reservation or reduced reservation, towards unpaid commissions that are owed to the agent. It does this automatically and it gives you the option to rebuild the effected payment statement so that you can provide yourself and your agent with detailed information regarding what the original over-paid commission was for and where that over-payment was subsequently applied. (Note: You do not have to rebuild the previous payment statement, Arctic will still apply the over-paid amount to the agent's unpaid commissions but rebuilding the old statement will make it clearer what changed and how it was handled.)
If you choose "No", Arctic will leave all commission payments as is and alert you to the fact that a change was made that impacted a previous payment statement. You can then choose to rebuild the effected payment statement so it accurately shows the commission owed or leave it as it was before. (Note: Again, you do not have to rebuild the previous payment statement, Arctic will display the overpaid amount for you when you view the change so you can if you wish just deduct that amount from the agent's next commission check but again rebuilding the old statement will make it easier to follow the changes for both yourself and your agents.) If you choose to rebuild the payment statement, Arctic will apply a "Payment" for the over-paid commission essentially indicating that the agent paid the commission back to you. If using this method, most often you will deduct the amount of the over-paid commission from the agent's next commission check rather than the agent actually sending you money back for the overage. If you decide to deduct the overpaid amount from the agent's commission check, you can then easily provide the agent with a copy of the revised payment statement along with a copy of their current payment statement. Between the two, the agent will be able to see how you arrived at the amount, you wrote for their commission check for the current period. In the "Payment Statements" section, we will discuss how to use the reallocation feature in further detail.
In the next section, we will discuss the concepts behind agent groups and how to create them.