Database Loading Guidelines

Interpreting Supplier Contracts

Before you begin loading any supplier contract, take time to interpret the contract and to ensure that it contains all the Supplier information you need in order to load the contract data into Tourwriter.

Make sure you understand the contract and that you have answers to the questions below before you start loading data:

  1. Are the rates provided net rates?
  2. What is the applicable markup or commission level?
  3. What currency are the rates in?
  4. Do the rates include all applicable taxes?
  5. Are there any room types I don’t need, or any seasons I won’t sell?
  6. Are the accommodation rates provided on a per room, per person or per group basis?

Be selective with regard to what you decide to load

Some supplier contracts are complex (i.e. they have a large number of Services and/or Seasons), in which case you could spend hours loading a single Supplier into your database if you were to load the entire content of the contract into your Tourwriter database. We strongly recommend that you only load the data you need and that you will use regularly.

Consider applying the ‘20/80’ rule.
Do you book 20% of your Suppliers 80% of the time? If so these are the Suppliers you should load first.
Do you book 20% of Services 80% of the time? If so these are the Services you should load for this Supplier.

Utilising these recommendations will help your team enormously and ultimately you will be using Tourwriter sooner!

General Rules

IMPORTANT – Load all of the relevant data in all of the Subtabs (i.e. Rates, including all Seasons and all Pricing options, Configs, Details and Warnings) for one Service before you copy it and use it as a base for another Service. This will save you a lot of time, as all of this information will be copied and can then be adjusted as needed, rather than having to manually load the relevant information each time.

Be consistent with the use of capitals particularly under Name and Option fields as this data will appear on your Vouchers, Invoices, Supplier emails etc.

Pricing options for selected season

  1. You cannot have the same Pricing Option name on any two lines, even if the Type is different.
  2. If the Charge is Group the Pricing option Type is left blank and all of the Pricing Options should be ticked as the Defaults (see example above).
  3. If the Charge is Room the Pricing option Type default is always Double (only one Pricing Option Type must be selected).
  4. If the Charge is Pax the Pricing option Type default is always Adult (only one Pricing option Type must be selected).

Suggested Abbreviations

  1. Always state, in brackets, the age range for the Child and Infant Option, together with whether the age is inclusive.
    Examples: Child (2-15 yrs inclusive) or Infant (0-2 yrs inclusive)
  2. When describing the number of people that can be accommodated, write as 2A + 3C instead of 2 adults and 3 children
  3. When describing the number of nights for a tour etc. use 5 nts instead of 5 nights
  4. When describing the room configuration use K for king, Q for queen and S for single, so 2 queen beds would be abbreviated to 2Q, and one king bed and 1 single bed would be abbreviated to 1K+1S
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