At the start, we seriously considered integrating Tres with an off-the-shelf general ledger (GL) system like QuickBooks. These platforms are well-established in the market—many CPAs already use QuickBooks, and the hosted version makes it easy for external accountants to access remotely. While no one system is perfect (QuickBooks included), most people in the industry are at least familiar with it, which can help reduce friction.
The idea was simple: key actions in Tres—like settled reservations or processed payments—would automatically trigger journal entries in QuickBooks. This would save us the effort of building our own GL from scratch, potentially cutting down significantly on development time and cost.
But once we got into the weeds, the picture changed.
Some integrations seemed straightforward at first—push a journal entry when a reservation is settled or a payment is made. But then came the edge cases: refunds, voided payments, payments tied to multiple reservations, and all the irregularities that are common in the travel industry. Handling these scenarios reliably would require a lot of manual intervention—with no guarantees that entries in either system would match or be validated properly.
That’s where the plan broke down.
In the high-velocity world of retail travel, exceptions aren’t rare—they’re the norm. And trying to force-fit a generic GL system into this workflow created more problems than it solved.
So we pivoted—and built our own.
By integrating accounting directly into Tres, we eliminated the need to reconcile between two separate systems. Everything is in one place. Users can view a journal entry and, with one click, trace it back to the original reservation or payment. If the source transaction is updated, the GL updates automatically—no batching, no delays. It’s real-time, accurate, and transparent. And of course, access is permission-controlled for security and compliance.
As it turned out, the supposed upsides of third-party GL integration didn’t hold up—aside from sparing our engineers some heavy lifting.
Tres offers remote access that’s just as seamless as QuickBooks. And from what we’ve heard, many users find Tres even easier to use. Accountants can jump in with little or no training. Plus, unlike a general-purpose GL, Tres’s ledger is purpose-built for the travel industry—designed to handle its quirks, complexities, and high transaction volume.
Third-party systems come with real downsides: extra costs, dual systems to maintain, disjointed data, limited visibility into source transactions, steeper learning curves, and endless reconciliation issues. In the end, the drawbacks far outweighed the benefits.
Yes, building a fully integrated GL within Tres was a major investment. But it was the right one—for our users, our product, and the long-term vision of Tres.