Every business trip leaves a trail of paper behind it: an order, a deposit, vouchers for the hotel, the shuttle and the car, a supplier invoice for each of them, a customer invoice for the client, and usually at least one query. For the travel agency in the middle, that trail is where the margin goes. PaperTrail has worked with South African travel businesses for more than two decades, and TravelHub is the result: one suite that takes a booking from order to paid.
This article walks through the pain points we hear most often from travel agents, hospitality owners and operators, car rental teams and the corporate travel liaisons who pay the bills, and how each part of the suite solves them. Every capability described here is live with customers today.
The paperwork behind every trip
A corporate trip is reconciled backwards. Finance has to get from the client’s order to the voucher, from the voucher to the supplier invoice, and from the supplier invoice to the customer invoice, then resolve any queries along the way. When one document is missing, the customer invoice waits. When the customer invoice waits, the client waits to pay, and corporate clients hold back payment when anything doesn’t add up.
Multiply that by every booking in a month and you get the back-office reality most agencies know too well: piles of supplier invoices, consultants chased for missing orders, hotels asked for the same breakfast slip three times, and month-end that never quite ends.
Pain point 1: supplier invoices arrive in every shape
Hotel groups, lodges, guesthouses, shuttle companies and car rental desks all invoice differently: by email, on paper, as PDFs of every layout, sometimes weeks after the stay. Someone has to receive them, find the booking and type the details in.
How TravelHub solves it. Invoices come in three ways, and all three end up in the same place, linked to the booking:
- Direct supplier integration. Hotel groups and large suppliers integrate system-to-system. When they raise an invoice in their own system, it arrives in TravelHub immediately: no email, no scanning, no retyping.
- Supplier invoice portal. Guesthouses, B&Bs and smaller operators receive an email with a secure link and upload their invoice against the booking, straight into the agency’s process.
- Automatic capture. Everything that still arrives by email is captured and indexed automatically.
Then TravelHub reads every invoice: the header (supplier, invoice number, date, VAT number, booking reference, passenger and totals) and every line item, without a template for each supplier.
Pain point 2: invoicing by hand
In many agencies a person still compares every supplier invoice with the order and voucher, then raises the customer invoice in the back-office system. It is slow, it is repetitive, and the small mismatches (an initial instead of a first name, a slightly different description) send perfectly good invoices to the exceptions pile.
How TravelHub solves it. Auto Invoicing matches the supplier invoice to the order and voucher (traveller, dates, services and amounts within your tolerance) and raises the customer invoice in your back office automatically. Prepaid bookings go into a fast-track queue. Your team only sees the exceptions.
With Scout, PaperTrail’s AI engine, some of those rigid validations are now judged the way a person would: “L. Molefe” on a hotel invoice is recognised as the same traveller as “Lerato Molefe” on the booking, so the invoice goes through instead of stopping.
Pain point 3: queries that bounce between inboxes
A missing order, a missing breakfast slip, a rate that doesn’t match the contract: every query means an email to a consultant or a supplier, a wait, a follow-up and a reply that arrives in someone else’s inbox. Meanwhile the invoice can’t be billed.
How TravelHub solves it. Queries have their own process, with separate routes for consultant, creditors and supplier queries. The user picks a reason from the query list and the query goes to the right person automatically.
- The Query Portal lets suppliers see their queries online, answer them and attach what is missing. Their answer lands back on the invoice inside the travel agency’s TravelHub.
- Daily reports show managers what is waiting on a query, what is not yet invoiced and how much each person processed the day before.
- Predicted queries. Scout learns from how your team works and raises the likely query (a missing slip or a rate above contract) as soon as the invoice arrives, before anyone has to look.
Pain point 4: deposits that get lost
Lodges, venues and operators often want money up front. Deposits are paid from one place and recorded in another, and when the final invoice arrives nobody is sure what has already been paid. Suppliers get paid twice, or not at all.
How TravelHub solves it. Prepayments are requested against the order, approved, paid and tracked in one place. When the final invoice arrives it is settled against the prepayment, so only the balance is paid.
Pain point 5: groups that multiply the paperwork
A conference for 24 people is 24 travellers, a rooming list, transfers, a venue and a fleet of cars, and each of those can generate its own voucher, invoice and query.
How TravelHub solves it. Group orders put every traveller, room and service on one order. Group vouchers are issued per supplier from that order, and every traveller’s services can be traced through to the supplier and customer invoices.
Pain point 6: clients who won’t pay without the proof
Corporate clients want the supplier invoice, the voucher and the order behind every customer invoice. Without them, payment waits. Sending documents one email at a time doesn’t scale.
How TravelHub solves it. Client portals give corporate clients secure access to their customer invoices with all the supporting documents. They can download what they need and raise a query on any invoice, which goes straight back to the person who processed it or to your debtors team, depending on your rules.
Pain point 7: spend data nobody can use
Even when invoices are captured, line items are a mess. One hotel writes “2 Nights, Dinner Bed & Breakfast”, another writes the room name, a restaurant appears as “James’ Diner”. Reporting on what was actually spent, or checking it against travel policy, means cleaning the data by hand.
How TravelHub solves it. Line items extracted from supplier invoices are normalised with Scout into your own categories: “James’ Diner” becomes Food, and “2 Nights, Dinner Bed & Breakfast” becomes Accommodation. Billing, reporting and policy checks all work from the same clean data.
What it means for you
- Travel agents and TMCs: booking files closed faster, fewer people typing invoices, queries tracked to the end, and month-end that actually ends.
- Hospitality owners and operators: invoice the agency the moment you raise it, from your own system or an emailed upload link, answer queries online and get paid without the paperwork chase.
- Car rental teams: rental, fuel and extras invoices land against the right voucher and traveller, and questions about an extra day or a missing slip are answered in one place.
- Corporate travel liaisons: every invoice comes with its proof in a client portal, queries are raised in a click, and whole groups are booked on one order.
AI on your terms
The AI capabilities in TravelHub run on Scout. Searching your documents with Scout Search shares nothing with an AI model, and documents are only shared with a model for the processes where you switch it on. You choose the model and where it runs, from cloud platforms to a local LLM on your own servers. Read more about Scout.
See the full suite
TravelHub connects to the travel systems you already use, including Amadeus, Galileo and your back-office system, and is tailored to the way your business handles orders, approvals and queries. Follow a booking through every step on the TravelHub page, or see how it fits your business on our travel solution page.