Top Tip - Saving Scheme

What is it?

Dolphin's Saving Scheme is a specific workflow devised to ease the financial impact of booking a holiday. It is designed to support the concept of a holiday fund whereby travellers can deposit money on a regular or ad hoc basis into a savings account set up with their travel agent. By doing so, the traveller can build up credit towards future travel arrangements, and when they are ready to make a booking they can make a withdrawal to cover or reduce the total cost. Perhaps more importantly, especially in times of economic uncertainty, it enables the traveller to spread the cost of their travel arrangements across multiple payments made over a given timeframe.

How does it work?

The workflow itself is pretty simple:

1. A travel folder is created to act as the savings account for the client. This folder will only be used for the client to deposit & withdraw funds, so no travel items will be added at any point. A non-billable item such as a zero value fee will be required, however.

2. The client can then call up or visit the branch whenever they wish to make a payment towards future travel arrangements. Each time a payment is made, the agent will issue a part payment receipt in the folder - for reconciliation purposes the form of payment will need to match the client's payment method, i.e. Cash, E fund transfer, payment card etc. In this example, the client has made 3 payments totalling £1000.00.

3. It is important for the agent to be able to provide the client with documentation indicating the total balance of funds deposited. The problem with standard documentation in these circumstances is that the balance on the folder will be a negative amount as the total payable is 0.00. To overcome this, a savings scheme version of the receipt/refund document has been created, so a subtype of this document will need to be configured in document setup.

When this is printed, the balance on the document will display as a positive value, and it will show as an advance payment.

4. When the client books a trip, a new folder will be created & the itinerary & costings will be added to this folder. In this example, a trip costing £799.00 has been booked. Assuming the client wishes to use credit to cover the entire cost of the holiday, the agent can simply transfer funds from the savings folder to the booking folder through the use of an adjustment refund & receipt. The two transactions can be cross referenced by adding free text informatiion into the printing or non-printing notes.