If your suppliers contact you to ask which invoices have been paid, as the remittance advice doesn’t give them enough information, then here is a tip that can save you time and make it easier for your suppliers to see which invoices have been paid. This tip is for Xero users who use the Purchases Export function in Tourwriter to export bookings out to Xero, in order to pay suppliers on weekly or monthly basis.
Follow the below steps to make Supplier Reference’s appear on the Xero remittance advice:
- Go to Tools > Setup > Accounting setup. At the bottom of this view is the Accounting Templates box:
Here you will see the file path to the Accounting Purchases Template, this is where the template is saved in your TourwriterData folder (normally an Excel file). Follow this path in your documents on My Computer, and open the template.
Note: To read the full file path, simply hover your pointer over the path name.
- In the opened Excel template you should see two rows. The top row shows all of the headings that Xero recognizes. The second row identifies which Tourwriter column headers are included in your export.
Column K (Invoice Number) is the column that pushes information into the Reference field on Xero invoices. In my example, the second row currently shows (yours may be customized slightly differently):
- The above are internal references and, while the itinerary name may be helpful for our suppliers, it doesn’t specify the Supplier’s own unique reference. To add the Supplier’s booking reference, you need to add [!BookingReference] to row 2 of Column K, so that it reads:
- Ensure you save your changes before you exit the template!
Once this change has been made to your template, the Supplier’s Reference simply needs to be entered into the Supplier Ref (or Ref) field in the applicable itinerary. Then this will be included on Xero remittance advice.
Important: This is for Xero users (who already export their bookings to Xero) only.
We recommend you test the export. Choose a few bookings that have been exported to Xero before (so you can easily delete them in Xero). Ensure they all have a reference in the Supplier Ref field. Export them for Tourwriter and Import into Xero as usual, so they appear in your Draft Invoices. You should now be able to see the Supplier’s Reference in the Reference field of the invoice (it will be the last number in that field). Finally, remember to delete the test invoices once you have checked them – as you don’t want to pay them twice!
