---
title: "How a day works"
url: https://tourcockpit.com/help/how-a-day-works
lang: en
description: "TourCockpit runs a tour company's day around a handful of ideas: tours in a catalog, tours placed on days, bookings that fill their seats, and one board that shows it all. This page explains those ideas once, in plain words, so every other page makes sense."
---

# How a day works

TourCockpit runs a tour company's day around a handful of ideas: tours in a catalog, tours placed on days, bookings that fill their seats, and one board that shows it all. This page explains those ideas once, in plain words, so every other page makes sense.

## What is the difference between a tour, a tour instance and a booking?

A Tour is a type of trip in your catalog: the route, the languages it is offered in, the prices. It exists once, with no date attached. Only a Published tour can be placed on a day.

When a tour is placed on a date it becomes a tour instance: this tour, running on this day, with its own guide, van and length. The same tour can run twice on the same day as two separate instances, each with its own seats.

People reserve seats on an instance as bookings. A booking is one party: the hotel, the pickup time, who to call, how they paid, and its passengers, counted as AD (adults), CH (children) and INF (infants). Everyone in the party occupies a seat, infants included, so the seat count always matches what the van has to carry.

The chain in one line: a Tour from the catalog becomes a tour instance when it is placed on a day; bookings fill its seats; each booking's party is its passengers, counted AD/CH/INF.

## Who can do what? The three roles

Every account has one role, and the screens it can open follow from it.

- Managers run the office: the board, bookings and Tour Planning, and the setup: the Tours catalog, Reference Data, who is off on which day, the Financials report, and inviting people from the Team screen.
- The Owner does everything a manager does, and two things more: the commercial terms with tour operators and the month-end settlement, and everyone else's work, because the Activity Log shows a manager their own changes and an Owner the whole office's.
- An Operator is an outside reseller with its own sign-in. Operators see a deliberately narrow portal: which days have seats to sell, and their own bookings only. They never see the office's screens or another operator's guests.

Managers invite office colleagues from the Team screen, and an operator's own people invite each other inside the operator portal, so nobody shares an account. How signing in works, including the first sign-in from an invite, has its own page.

## How does a day flow, morning to night?

1. The days are planned ahead. On Tour Planning the office decides which tours run on which dates, a week or a month at a glance, creating a tour instance for each. A tour can also be added to a single day straight on the board with + Add tour.
2. Bookings arrive all day. The office types them in on the board with + Add booking as they come in by phone and email, and tour operators book their own guests through the portal. Every booking, whichever door it came in by, is checked for the seats left and the price, and none saves without a hotel from the company's own list and the language its guests speak. That language then decides where it can go: a booking sits only on a tour whose guide speaks it, from every door and the office included, while a tour with no guide yet takes any language. When the guide is to collect cash on board, the figure is never more than the booking is worth, and a tour marked Adults only takes neither children nor infants. A private tour carries one rule more: once one party has taken it, the vehicle goes to that group, and no second booking is accepted on it from any door, the office included. A tour operator is held to one more: never a third language on one departure. The pickup time fills itself in from the hotel's zone.
3. The board is the single picture of the day. One block per tour running, with its GUIA, FURGO and LARGO or CORTO in the header, one row per booking, and the day's totals. Editing happens right there: change a row, move a party to another tour, mark a guide off sick.
4. The day closes on paper or on a phone. The board prints, exports to PDF and XLS, and shares as an image, so the drivers and the office all leave with the same picture.
5. Month end adds itself up. The Financials screen builds the totals for a week or a month from what the board already recorded: the cash per guide, the days worked, the tours by length and the half days that are paid at neither rate, and what the bookings were worth, per operator and per way of paying. Nobody types a period in again.

Every change along the way is recorded with who made it and when. The History on a booking, a tour or a day answers "who cancelled this?" for the whole office, whoever asks; the Activity Log answers "what changed on Tuesday?", your own changes there, and an Owner's the whole office's.

## Why do some words stay the same in every language?

The office ran its day from a spreadsheet long before TourCockpit, and the sheet's own vocabulary is what everyone says out loud, over the radio and on the phone. Those words stay exactly as they are in every language, on purpose, so the screen reads like the sheet it replaced.

- GUIA is the guide leading the tour, named in each block's header.
- CHOFER is the optional second crew member who only drives, on days when the guide should not do both jobs.
- FURGO is the van assigned to the tour. Its seat count is what the tour can carry.
- LARGO and CORTO are the two tour lengths, full and short.
- TKT is a payment the guest already holds as a ticket or voucher.
- T.O. is the tour operator a booking came through.
- AD, CH and INF count the party: adults, children, infants.

If a label on the board looks untranslated, it is one of these. It is not a gap; changing it would break the one vocabulary the whole office already shares.

## What do the words on the screens mean?

| Word | What it means |
| --- | --- |
| Departure, tour instance, block | One tour on one date, with its own seats, guide and van. |
| Party | The guests on one booking: adults, children and infants. One booking is one party. |
| GUIA | The guide, who leads the tour and speaks to the guests. |
| CHOFER | The optional second crew member, who only drives. |
| FURGO | The van. Its seats are what the departure can carry. |
| LARGO, CORTO | The long and the short route, set on each departure on the day. |
| Medio Día | The half-day family of tours. It is a family, never a length, and is counted on its own. |
| TKT | A payment the guest already holds as a ticket or voucher. |
| CASH | A payment the guide collects on board, in part or in whole. |
| T.O., operator, desk | An outside reseller that books seats through its own portal. |
| AD, CH, INF | Adults, children and infants in a party. |
| Convoy | Departures on the same day to the same destination that travel together. |
| Kept for | The desks a departure is offered to. None named means every desk. |
| Owner, Manager | The two office roles. |
| Desk member | A person who signs in for an operator. |
| Settlement | The reckoning with each operator for a week or a month: gross, commission and net. |
| RIEPILOGO | The cash each guide picked up and the tours they ran, on Financials. |
| Sandbox | A detached copy of a company for trying things out. It never messages a real person. |