What you’re owed, what arrived, and what’s late.
Commission on a cruise you book today may not arrive for another eighteen months. A CRM that stores one commission figure cannot tell you what is outstanding. This one stores both sides of the ledger and the supplier's payment terms alongside them.
Expected and received are two different numbers
This is the part most tools get wrong, and it is not a small thing. A cruise pays commission after the ship sails. The booking might be made in March for a sailing the following August, with the supplier paying sixty days after return. That is nearly eighteen months between the work and the money.
If your system records one commission number, it cannot answer the only question that matters in that gap: what am I owed right now, and who is late? Every reservation in Travel Agent Companion carries both figures and the terms that connect them.
- Expected commission
- What the booking should earn, recorded when you book it — not when it pays.
- Received commission
- What actually arrived. A separate number, because the two are frequently not the same.
- Received date
- When it landed. This is what turns "outstanding" from a feeling into a date range.
- Payment terms
- How many days after sailing this supplier pays. Held per reservation, so a late payer is visible as late rather than as missing.
- Follow-up interval
- How long to wait before chasing. The difference between chasing and forgetting.
- Commission notes
- Why this one is different — a split, an override, a negotiated rate, a dispute.
- Planning fees
- Charged and collected, tracked apart from commission. Your revenue is not the vendor’s.
- Booking value
- What the trip is worth, so commission can be read as a rate rather than a number in isolation.
Commission tracking: two commissions overdue totalling $1,380, a cashflow chart of projected against received by month, totals of $14,345 expected and $4,208 received, a per-reservation ledger, and a per-supplier breakdown.
Built for independent cruise agents and small agencies who need the number, not a forecast.
Join the waitlistThe three dates a cruise booking lives or dies by
Deposit received. Final payment due. Final payment received. Miss the middle one and the cruise line cancels the booking — not as a warning, as a cancellation. It is the single most expensive administrative mistake in cruise selling.
All three are tracked dates on the reservation rather than reminders you set yourself, so the deadline belongs to the booking. When you leave, or take a week off, it is still there.
Reporting on a year that has already happened
Revenue and commission by period. Conversion from lead to booking. Which suppliers you actually sell, and which ones pay on time. Quote analytics, annual performance, travel statistics, and goals per agent.
These are reports on what happened, not forecasts. That distinction is deliberate: a pre-launch platform predicting your next quarter would be inventing numbers, and you would be right not to trust it.
Running the agency, not just the pipeline
Team members with their own access, delegation between agents, and an audit log that records who saw and changed what. For a two-to-five person agency, the audit trail is usually the difference between a disagreement and an argument.
Getting the numbers out
The reporting and financial views export to CSV, so the commission and profit-and-loss numbers are yours to take into a spreadsheet or an accountant’s hands. A single account-level export of everything is on the roadmap rather than in the product today, and it is worth being precise about that rather than letting you find out later.
Where your records live, who can see them, and what moves with you if you change host agency is a bigger subject than a reporting feature. Data ownership and migration covers it properly.
| A general-purpose CRM | Travel Agent Companion | |
|---|---|---|
| Commission | One value on the deal, recorded once. | Expected and received tracked separately, with the date it landed. |
| When it pays | Assumed to be at close, because that is when software and consulting get paid. | The supplier's payment terms in days, plus a follow-up interval for chasing. |
| Cruise deadlines | A reminder you set yourself, if you remember. | Deposit received, final payment due and final payment received as tracked dates on the reservation. |
| Your own fees | Mixed in with commission, or not recorded. | Planning fees charged and collected, kept apart from vendor commission. |
Why a general-purpose CRM can't do this
Generic CRMs model money as a deal value that closes on a date. That shape fits software and consulting, where the invoice follows the signature. It does not fit travel, where the sale, the travel and the payment are three separate events spread across a year or more, and the amount is a percentage of someone else’s transaction that you do not control.
So agents keep a commission spreadsheet. It works, until it is the only place the numbers live and it has one row per booking across four years. What is missing from a generic CRM is not a commission field — it is the idea that expected and received are different facts.
Keep reading
- Data ownership & migration
Your book of business stays yours.
- Reservations & journeys
Cruise bookings stored as cruises — cabins, decks, ports, deadlines.
Know what you're owed without opening a spreadsheet.
Travel Agent Companion is in early access. Join the waitlist and we’ll email you when it opens up.