Overview
Agency booking requirements allow agency owners to set up required fields to mark items as 'booked' for commission reconciliation. This is often an important step to ensure you have the information you need to match supplier payments and pay your agents.
Setting Up Booking Requirements
Agency owners configure booking requirements from Back Office. In the left sidebar, under Settings, select Agency controls. The Booking requirements section is at the top of the page.
💡 Pro Tip: We recommend requiring confirmation numbers at a minimum to help with reconciliation. If there should only be one booking per confirmation number, then we also recommend enabling Unique Confirmation Number.
Agent submission process
Agents who submit their bookings through an agency with required fields set up will need to fill in these fields on the Booking & Pricing tab before marking items as 'booked'. This includes selecting the correct Accreditation from the dropdown in the Booking details section. The accreditation determines which agency the booking is logged under and which commission types are available.
If any required fields are missing when the agent clicks "Mark as Booked," they'll receive an error prompting them to correct the issue before the booking can be submitted.
Required Fields - Explained
Confirmation number: booking must include a confirmation number
Agency Supplier: the 'booking supplier' must match an Agency Supplier and they cannot select from the global supplier list below.
Traveler: at least one traveler must be added to the trip Overview page
Expected commission amount: must be greater than 0
Expected commission date: The booking must include the date commission is expected
Total booking price: must be added within the Booking & Pricing tab
Unique confirmation number: Each confirmation number must be unique per supplier across all agents in your agency. Only bookings in Booked status reserve a confirmation number. A booking in Planning or Canceled status does not, so its number is free to reuse. This keeps commission reconciliation accurate, because supplier statement line items are matched to bookings by confirmation number.
Supplier Warnings
We've also added a feature that warns you when a non-Agency supplier is selected on the Booking & Pricing tab. This will help catch potential booking errors early.
Fixing a duplicate confirmation number
If you try to mark a booking as Booked and see "The confirmation number has already been taken," another Booked booking with the same supplier is already using that number.
This usually happens when a trip was rebooked and the original booking still has a Booked status. To resolve it:
Find the original booking that holds the confirmation number, with the same supplier.
Set that booking's status to Canceled. A Canceled booking releases its confirmation number for reuse. Cancelling the trip is not the same as setting the booking's status to Canceled, so change the status on the booking itself.
Return to the new booking and enter the real confirmation number. It will save once the original no longer holds it.
Note: Do not work around the error by changing the confirmation number (for example, adding a letter or extra digit). Commission reconciliation matches supplier payments to bookings by confirmation number, so an altered number will not match the supplier's statement and the commission will not be tracked automatically.
Each booking tracks its own commission by its own confirmation number, so two bookings on one trip do not need to be split for their commission to be tracked separately.
Still Have Questions?
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If you are a new agency setting up their agency on Tern for the first time, please follow the next steps below.
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