What a current account between agencies is
A current account between travel agencies is the record of what one agency owes another for services it sold and has not been paid for yet. The receptive agency operates the service (the excursion, the transfer, the accommodation) and the buying agency sells it to its passenger at the public price. There is no payment at the moment of booking: there is a balance that builds up through the month and gets settled later, against an invoice or a transfer. It is the most common way agencies work with each other in Argentina, and the one a spreadsheet handles worst, because the balance changes with every booking and the booking is entered by the other party.
How it is done today, and why it hurts
The typical setup is four tools that do not talk to each other. The rate sheet goes out by email in a spreadsheet, one tab per season and another per agency level. Bookings come in over WhatsApp, with the date and the passengers in a message somebody has to copy somewhere else afterwards. Capacity lives in another sheet. And the debt in a fourth one, updated by a single person and usually out of date exactly when someone asks.
That works with 2 or 3 buying agencies. With 10 it stops working, and it always fails in the same order: first something is sold off an old rate sheet, then a seat gets confirmed that was no longer there, and at the end of the month a gap appears between what one agency says it owes and what the other says it is owed. That last argument is the most expensive of all, because it is not settled with data: it is settled with memory.
The circuit, step by step
- The invitation. The selling agency invites the buyer with a link, and assigns it a rate level, a currency and a credit limit.
- The net rate. Every product has its public price and its net rate. The buyer opens the catalogue and sees the price that belongs to it, not the one that belongs to the others. If there is a rate agreed with that particular agency, that is the one applied.
- The booking. The buyer books on its own: picks the date, the number of passengers and enters the details. Capacity is subtracted right there, from the same number the website, the counter and WhatsApp use. Nobody confirms a seat that is already sold.
- The entry. The sale is posted to that agency's current account, in the currency of the operation, without anyone copying it by hand.
- The settlement. It is collected when it is due: transfer, online payment or offset. The balance goes down on its own.
That circuit is what the Viajalo B2B network puts together, where the selling agency publishes its catalogue and the buyers book on their own.
The credit limit is the piece that changes everything
Of the whole circuit, the part that cannot be held together by hand is the limit. A credit limit is the maximum an agency can owe before the system stops the next booking. Without it, control is a person remembering to check a spreadsheet right before confirming, and that person is sometimes off that day.
With the limit in place, the uncomfortable conversation disappears: nobody has to say no to anyone, because the booking is stopped at the door and the alert arrives on its own. And above all, the debt stops growing while nobody is looking. That is the difference between a current account and an overdraft.
What to look at before opening an account for a new agency
Before opening a current account for a new agency, three questions are enough. How much it sells per month, so the limit looks like its operation and not like a number picked at random. How often it settles, because every 15 days is not the same as every 30. And who enters the bookings on the other side, the person you will be talking to when something goes wrong, and it helps to know them before it does.
After that, the limit gets adjusted with whatever happens: if it settles on time 3 months in a row, it goes up. If it is late twice, it goes down. The advantage of having it in the system is that raising or lowering it is a number, not an argument.
Where none of this is needed
If you sell to 1 agency and invoice it once a month, a spreadsheet is enough and will go on being enough. A current account becomes necessary when there are several, when each one has its own rate, or when whoever enters the booking is not the same person who keeps the debt. That is where the problem stops being the record and becomes the synchronisation, which is exactly what a spreadsheet does not do.