Tracking hotel commission without Excel

Almost every transfer company in Greece works the same way. The hotel sends the guest, you run the transfer, and at the end of the month the hotel gets its commission. The percentage differs by partnership, sometimes it differs by route, and at some hotels the deal is not a percentage at all but a fixed amount per transfer.

So far so reasonable. The problem starts with how that number is kept.

The notebook and the spreadsheet

The familiar picture: a notebook in the office where every transfer gets written in by hand with the hotel next to it, or a spreadsheet with columns for date, guest, route, price, hotel, percentage, commission. At the start of the season it is clean. By mid-August it has blank rows, two different spellings of the same hotel, and a percentage column that someone updated only on the new rows when the deal changed back in June.

The end of the month is where the damage shows. You filter by hotel, add it up, send the amount. The hotel replies that the number does not add up. What follows is an hour on the phone comparing line by line, and usually they are right about two transfers and you are right about one.

The reasons are always the same four:

• Missing transfers. A booking that came in by phone or by message and never made it into the sheet. The transfer happened, the commission was never recorded.
• Wrong percentage. The deal moved from 10% to 12% and the sheet holds both, depending on when the row was written.
• Cancellations. The transfer was cancelled but the row stayed, or it was cancelled and the whole row was deleted, so now the two sides are counting a different number of jobs.
• Manual calculation. Someone worked the commission out on their phone and typed it in. One wrong digit in 300 rows is not something anybody finds.

None of these causes is a question of carelessness. They come from the number being calculated somewhere other than where the work is recorded.

What changes with a per-hotel percentage

The change is simple to describe and makes a large difference in practice: the commission percentage lives on the hotel, not in a column a person fills in.

You set once that this particular hotel has its own commission. From then on, every transfer that belongs to that hotel carries the calculation with it. There is no "write in the percentage" step, so there is no "I forgot to change the percentage" step either. When the deal changes, you change it on the hotel.

The second piece is that the transfer has to enter the system in the first place, rather than being copied in afterwards. That is why it matters where bookings come from. When bookings arrive by email and land automatically in a queue, when the hotel enters its own request, or when the guest scans a QR code at reception, the transfer already exists with the hotel attached to it. Nobody has to remember to write it in the notebook.

The report per period

The third piece is the report. Instead of filtering a sheet, you ask for the period and the hotel, and you get what happened and what is owed. The total comes out of the transfers themselves, so there is no second source of truth to disagree with the first.

In Odyrides reports cover up to 90 days on paid plans, which is enough for a monthly settlement and for going back over a previous month if someone questions it. There is also an Excel export, if the hotel wants the detailed file for its own books. The difference from the old Excel is that this file is now an output, not a source.

If you work with several hotels, it also helps that you can look at one hotel on its own or at the whole business together, without merging files. More on that on the partner settlements page.

Why the right number is worth more than the time

The obvious win is the hour you no longer spend agreeing on totals. The less obvious one is the relationship.

A hotel that has to check your figure every month slowly learns not to trust you on numbers, even when you are reliable on the work itself. And the other way round, a partner who gets an amount every month with the detail behind it, without having to ask, has no reason to go looking at what the company next door offers. Commission is the most measurable part of your partnership, so it is also the first thing that judges your credibility.

You do not have to change everything at once. A sensible first step is to write down which percentage applies today for each partner and since when. Even if you stay on Excel a while longer, having a single answer to the question "what did we agree" solves half the problem. If you want to see the relationship from the partner's side, there is a page for hotels.