Shirley Sweeney and Paul Sonenshine from our Support Desk contribute to this newsletter with TRAMS Back Office and ClientBase tips that we’re confident you will find useful.

Shirley is an eight-year member of our Support Team, as well as, one of our instructors in Los Angeles, at TechU and Summer Camp. She explains the new features and look of the Deposit Screen in TRAMS Back Office.

Paul is a seven-year member of our team and our ClientBase expert on the desk. He is always willing to help and patiently takes the time to share his knowledge with his colleagues and our clients. Paul prepared a list of frequently asked questions along with the answers to those questions that you may find helpful. Thank you, Paul and Shirley for your contribution to our Support Team.

Joan McLeod
Office Manager

New Deposit Screen
(By Shirley Sweeney)

You’ve updated to 2.05.00, and notice that we’ve changed the Deposit screen (Payments|Deposit). This change is designed to assist your agency in making sure your receipts and deposits balance at the end of the month and you also now have the option of printing a deposit slip listing all the receipts for a deposit.

When you enter the payment date, the receipt date range automatically fills and you can now query for all receipts for the specified bank account by the date range. We still recommend entering the receipts on the same date as your deposit. If your receipt date range is for more than one day, your GL Reconciliation Report lists a warning that your receipts and deposits are different for each date. By default, all of the receipts in the date range are included in the total for the deposit. You do have the option to select and toggle the receipt so it is not included if are doing more than one deposit for that date.

You can print a copy of the receipts for this Deposit by clicking the Deposit Slip button. This slip includes your routing number and bank account if you have entered this information in Utilities|Setup|Bank Accounts. Several agencies have found that if you attach a blank copy of your bank’s deposit slip to this form, your bank may accept this for your deposit slip saving you manually filling out the bank’s deposit slip.

Since the receipt and the deposit are linked, you cannot void a receipt without voiding the deposit. If you right mouse click on a receipt, you can view the deposit to get a payment number, making it easier to query and void a deposit.

ClientBase Q&A
(By Paul Sonenshine)

Q. I'm doing a query for a marketing promotion and I want to exclude anyone that has a specific marketing code selected. How do I do this?

A. Do a Level 3 query. When you open the Marketing Tab, find the code you want to exclude and click it twice. The first click adds a check, the second click adds an exclude symbol. Any profiles containing this code are not included in your profile query result list.

Q. Why aren't the addresses moving across in Merge to PNR or when I create a new Res Card!

A. Check to be sure that you have an address designated with a Type of "Bill To" and/or "Ship To".

Q: I would like to do some e-mail marketing but just don't have enough e-mail addresses in my database? How can I build my database?

A: Targeted e-mail marketing can be your most effective and least expensive form of marketing. To take advantage of this opportunity, you just need to do two things:

1. Make a commitment to collect and maintain your customer's e-mail addresses.

2. Use the tool that ClientBase Plus provides. Using the Required Fields feature in the Global Default menu, set the E-mail Address field to "optional" for Leisure profiles and your agents automatically get a reminder each time they try to save a profile without an e-mail entry. Setting the Required Field Option to "Required" is not recommended, as you cannot save a profile or any change without entering an e-mail address and not all clients have them just yet.

Q: Whenever I try to use Live Connect, I get a script error when connecting to the provider’s website.

A. Check to be sure all the Live Connect Vendor Codes are in Upper Case.

Q: Where can I a get a list of all participating Live Connect providers and their vendor codes?

A. For the most current list, visit the TRAMS website and click on the link for participating Live Connect Providers.

Q: How do I get Vendor Lists to show up in my family/employee level travel preferences?

A. In the Employee/Family Member Profile Tab, you have the capability of identifying who your clients' preferred vendors are by travel category. For a listing of vendors to appear in the corresponding tab, you must first associate your Vendor profiles with the desired travel category. For instance, for Carnival to appear as an option within the "Cruise Prefs" tab, open Carnival's profile, click the arrow to the right of the travel category box, and check Cruise. Bet you a buck it shows up in the cruise preference list in the Family Member tab of the profile.

Q: How Do I Find my Past Customers with “No Business” for the Past Year?

A. Assuming you have travel history from TRAMS Back Office or imported from another system, use a Level 3 Query.

1. In General Tab, set Travel Type to Leisure
2. In Travel History Tab Filter Type=Does NOT Have Any Travel History Records with the following criteria

a. Set Invoice Issue Dates to: "=0,0,-1" to "=0,0,0"
b. Set Invoice Total Fare to: 1.00 to 100,000.00

Q: How Do I Delete Profiles with Activities

A: If you have tried to delete profiles with activities, you know you can't delete the profiles until you delete the activities. Here is a simple way to do it.

1. Change the profiles to Inactive.
2. In Activity Manager, using a level 2 query, find all the activities attached to the Inactive Profiles you just updated. You may also wish to use other profile criteria such as modify date.
3. Go to the Edit Menu at the top of the screen and click Select All and delete the Activities.
4. In Profile Manager, delete all the Profiles using the same criteria used in step 2.

Hope you find this helpful.