Billing corporate travel clients for many bookings
How a travel management company bills a corporate client that books many trips a month, from invoice per booking or monthly to statements and collection.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Travel businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
A mining services company sends engineers to site every week. A bank flies its regional managers to head office for quarterly meetings. An NGO books field staff into towns across the region. For a travel management company, each of these corporate clients means dozens of bookings a month, each with a traveller, a cost centre, sometimes a purchase order number, and an accounts payable team at the other end that will not pay anything it cannot match.
How you invoice those bookings decides how quickly you are paid. Get the format wrong and invoices sit in the client's query pile; get it right and a monthly payment clears the account. This article sets out the choices and how they run in Achekam.
An invoice per booking or one a month
There are two common patterns, and the client's accounts payable process usually decides between them.
| Invoice per booking | One invoice per month | |
|---|---|---|
| What the client gets | An invoice soon after each trip is booked or ticketed | One invoice at month end listing every booking |
| Good for | Clients who code each trip to a project or cost centre | Clients who want one document to approve and pay |
| Risk for you | Many small invoices to chase | A disputed line can hold up the whole invoice |
| VAT timing | Each booking on its own invoice date | All bookings on the month-end date |
Ask the client's finance team which they prefer before the first booking, and write it into the account agreement. Whichever you choose, put the traveller's name, travel dates, route or destination, cost centre and any order number on every line. Invoice lines in Achekam are typed in, so you can describe each booking fully; what you write is exactly what the client's AP clerk will try to match.
No recurring invoices: what to set up instead
A business cannot set up a recurring invoice for a customer in Achekam at the time of writing. That matters less for corporate travel than for subscriptions, because no two months' bookings are the same, but it does mean the month-end invoice is prepared by a person.
If you invoice monthly, run it as a routine:
- Pull every booking for the client from your reservation system for the month.
- Create the invoice as a draft, one line per booking, with the details above.
- Check the draft against the bookings list, and have a second person compare its total with the reservation system.
- Issue it on the agreed date. Issuing takes the next number in your sequence and posts debtors, sales and output VAT. Default terms are 30 days; use the terms in the client's agreement.
If you invoice per booking, the same discipline applies at a weekly check: every ticketed booking for the week has an issued invoice.
A monthly statement the client's finance team can check
Corporate clients reconcile their suppliers. A statement of account from you is what they reconcile against. The server produces a customer statement of account as a PDF that can be e-mailed, and the screen says whether it was sent.
Credit control, which is on for new workspaces, also e-mails a monthly statement to every customer with a balance, and records whether each went out. Make sure the statement goes to the client's accounts payable address, not to the travel booker who requested the trips. The booker rarely reconciles anything; the AP clerk does.
When a client queries a line on the statement, answer quickly with the booking details. A statement with one disputed booking can stop payment of all the others.
One payment covering many invoices
Corporate clients pay in batches: one transfer, with a remittance advice listing the invoices it pays. Record it once in receivables and spread it across that client's invoices as the remittance says. A part payment leaves an invoice part-paid, and any extra is held on the client's account.
Then reconcile the bank. Matching a bank receipt to an invoice does not on its own record the payment on the invoice: it must also be recorded in receivables, otherwise reminders keep going to a client who has paid. One client payment covering several invoices walks through the allocation step by step.
Reminders and the age analysis for account clients
Credit control e-mails overdue reminders once a day, by default at 7, 14 and 30 days overdue with the invoice PDF attached, never charges anyone, and records whether each e-mail went out. For corporate clients, those reminders are a useful nudge to the AP team, but the relationship is usually managed by phone.
Each month, review the age analysis. Receivables are aged into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. A useful measure across your account clients is how long they take to pay on average; Investopedia explains days sales outstanding, how it is calculated and what it shows about how quickly customers pay. A client whose payment time keeps lengthening is a client to talk to before you extend more credit.
If the same company also books group trips, see group trips: invoice the organiser or each traveller. The monthly drafting routine is similar to the one in monthly invoices for subscribers.
Before the next corporate account opens
Agree four things with the client's finance team in writing: invoice per booking or monthly, the details each line must show, the AP e-mail address for invoices and statements, and the payment terms. Set up the account accordingly, and the first month's invoices will be paid rather than queried.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
