Managing Suppliers

A supplier record is the agency's stored profile for a hotel group, airline, car rental company, cruise line, rail operator or tour operator. You need one before you can raise a supplier payment request, because the payment request pulls its banking information straight off the supplier record. Suppliers live at Bookings > Suppliers and are shared across the whole consultant team.

The Supplier List

The page header reads Supplier Management and carries two buttons: Export CSV and Add Supplier. Four summary tiles sit above the table — Total Suppliers, Active Partners, Total Revenue and Avg Commission — all calculated across every supplier, not just the ones your filters leave on screen.

Below that you get one search box and two filters:

• Search suppliers — matches the supplier name, the contact person, and the city and country of the address. It does not search the email address or the notes.
• Type — Airlines, Hotels, Car Rentals, Cruises, Rail or Tour Operators.
• Status — Active, Pending or Suspended.

Results are paginated 20 to a page. The table columns are Supplier, Contact, Performance, Commission, Status and Actions. A gold award icon next to the name means the supplier was flagged as a preferred supplier when it was created.

The Three Row Actions

• View Details (eye icon) and View Contract (document icon) open the same read-only panel. It shows contract expiry, commission rate, payment terms, support level, total bookings, total revenue, rating, average response time, the contact block, the address and the notes. There is no contract document to download — “contract” here just means the commercial terms stored on the record.
• Contact (envelope icon) opens a new mail message in your default mail client, addressed to the supplier's email with the subject “Inquiry about” followed by the supplier name. Nothing is logged in TravelFlow.

Adding a Supplier

1. Go to Bookings > Suppliers and click Add Supplier.
2. Fill in the five required text fields: Supplier Name, Contact Person, Email, Phone and Commission (%). Leaving any of them blank produces a specific error, for example “Contact person is required” or “Valid commission percentage is required”.
3. Pick the Supplier Type (Airline, Hotel, Car Rental, Cruise, Rail or Tour Operator). It defaults to Airline, so change it if that is wrong — the type drives the icon on the list and the Type filter, and you cannot change it later.
4. Optionally add the Website, the address block, and Payment Terms (Immediate, Net 15, Net 30, Net 45 or Net 60 — default Net 30).
5. Certifications and Specialties are single text inputs that you fill with comma-separated values, for example “IATA, ISO 9001”. Each value is stored as a separate entry.
6. Complete Bank Details (for EFT payments) if the supplier is paid by transfer — see the next section.
7. Add Notes, tick Mark as Preferred Supplier if it applies, then click Create Supplier. You land back on the supplier list with a “Supplier <name> created successfully!” confirmation.

Bank Details Are the Whole Point

The supplier payment request form has no bank-detail fields of its own. When you save a payment request, TravelFlow copies Account Name, Account Number, Bank Name, Branch Code and SWIFT Code off the supplier you selected and stores them on the request, where the approver sees them under Supplier Bank Details. If the supplier record has no banking information, the payment request carries none and whoever pays it has nowhere to send the money. Only the supplier record supplies them: a request that sends bank details of its own is refused. Consultant admins, accountants, finance admins and super admins see them in full, each view recorded in the audit log; a consultant sees the account number to its last four digits.

The bank block is only saved when you fill in at least one of Account Name, Account Number or Bank Name. SWIFT is optional and is only stored when you type something in it.

Fields You Do Not Control

Several columns on the list look like live performance data but are set once when the record is created and are never updated by the app:

• Status — always starts as Active. Nothing in the consultant portal sets Pending or Suspended, so those two filter options will normally return nothing.
• Rating, Total Bookings and Revenue — all start at zero and stay there. The Total Revenue and Avg Commission tiles are therefore only as meaningful as the commission percentages you typed in.
• Support Level — always Bronze.
• Avg Response Time — always “N/A”.
• Contract Expiry — automatically set to one year from the day you created the record, which is what the “Expires:” date under the status badge is showing.

GDS Suppliers Create Themselves

You do not need to capture RateHawk by hand. The first time someone raises a supplier payment from an accepted GDS quotation, TravelFlow looks for a supplier matching the GDS provider name and creates one if it is missing. That record is type Hotel, 0% commission, no bank details, and its payment terms read “Card on file — provider deducts payment and settles suppliers on our behalf”.

Exporting the List

Export CSV downloads the suppliers currently left by your search and filters as suppliers-YYYY-MM-DD.csv, not just the page you are looking at. The file carries supplier, type, contact, email, phone, the full address, commission percentage, payment terms, rating, bookings, revenue, status, support level and contract expiry. Bank details are not exported.

When a Supplier Does Not Appear on a Payment Request

• The supplier payment form only lists suppliers whose status is Active or Pending. A suspended supplier is hidden there even though it still shows on the supplier list.
• There is no add-a-supplier shortcut inside the payment form. If the supplier is missing you have to leave the form, create it under Bookings > Suppliers, and start the request again — so create the supplier first.