Daily Close and Guide Accounts: Step-by-Step Guide

What does "closing the day" actually mean for a tour operator?

Closing the day means removing the uncertainty from your cash: knowing how much came in, how much went out, what you owe each guide or collaborator, and what they owe you. It's not just counting bills. It's reconstructing, departure by departure, what happened with the money and recording it in one place, not in a voice note, a notebook, or a spreadsheet only its creator understands.

For an operator running two or three departures a day with several rotating guides, this close gets complicated fast. One guide received an advance last week. Another has a pending bonus from a big departure. A third paid for the boat's gas out of pocket and needs to be reimbursed. If all of this lives in scattered WhatsApp messages, someone ends up reconstructing the whole story every month-end, and a number almost never adds up.

This guide is for the operator who wants to stop chasing that information and centralize the daily close, advances, loans and bonuses per collaborator in one place.

Why don't loose spreadsheets cut it for this?

A spreadsheet works fine while one person is operating and there are few departures a month. The problem shows up once the team grows: several guides, several sellers, different commissions per partner, and money movements that aren't just "income" or "expense" but advances to be deducted later, loans paid in installments, or bonuses tied to a goal met.

In a spreadsheet, each of these cases needs a different formula, and every manual correction is a chance for an error. Worse, nobody but the person who built it can interpret it with confidence. When the owner travels or hands the close to a new administrator, the spreadsheet becomes an obstacle instead of a help.

Terra, Skyline's AI booking engine, solves this with two pieces working together: the per-departure settlement panel and operations accounting.

How does the per-departure close work in Terra?

Every tour that runs has its own cash box. Terra builds a settlement panel per departure: that's where that specific tour's cash sits, with automatic drafts, receipts and an AI reading of the report the guide submits when the tour ends.

This changes the order of work. Instead of the operator waiting until month-end to reconstruct what happened on each departure, every tour arrives with its own close ready as soon as it finishes. The guide sends their report, Terra reads it with AI and builds a settlement draft: how much came in, how much was spent, what's left for the operator, and what's owed to the guide.

Example: a kayak operator in Guatapé

Picture an operator with three guides rotating kayak tours in Guatapé. Each guide collects cash for the departure when a traveler didn't pay online, pays for the support boat's gas, and sometimes buys snacks for the group. Without a per-departure panel, the owner would have to call every guide at the end of the day to ask how much they spent and received.

With the settlement panel, each kayak departure gets recorded with its own cash box: what the traveler paid, what the guide spent on gas and snacks, and the corresponding receipt. The automatic draft saves the operator the task of reconstructing numbers from a chat thread.

Steps to close a departure

1. The guide finishes the tour and submits their report (cash received, expenses, receipts).
2. Terra reads that report with AI and generates a settlement draft for that departure.
3. The operator reviews the draft: income, the guide's expenses, what's left in the cash box.
4. The settlement is confirmed and archived with its receipts, ready to check whenever needed.

How do you keep accounts with guides and collaborators without losing track?

This is where the second piece comes in: Terra's operations accounting. It's not just about closing each departure separately, it's about keeping a running account for every person who works with you over time.

Terra records the daily close, accounts with collaborators (advances, loans and bonuses), and commissions and payments between partners, all in the same system where bookings and settlements already live.

This means an advance you gave a guide last week doesn't disappear into a WhatsApp message: it's recorded as a movement tied to that person, and it can be deducted from their next settlement without anyone having to remember it by heart.

Advances: money you front that has to be deducted later

An advance is money the operator gives a guide or collaborator before they've earned it through work. The risk of not recording it is simple: by month-end nobody remembers exactly how much was advanced, and the guide may end up charging too much, or the operator paying too much without noticing.

Once it lives inside Terra's accounting, the advance is tied to that specific collaborator's account. When their next settlement comes around, the system already has that record, and the deduction is made against a real figure, not an estimate.

Loans: the same idea, but in installments

A loan works differently from an advance because it's not deducted all at once: it's paid in installments or gradually deducted departure after departure. Keeping this in a loose spreadsheet is more error-prone because you have to remember, every time, how much is still outstanding.

Inside Terra's accounting, the loan stays as a balance tied to the collaborator. Every payment or deduction shows up in that account, and at any point the operator can see how much is still owed, without reconstructing the history from scratch.

Bonuses: what gets earned above the baseline

A bonus is an extra payment, usually tied to a goal met or a particularly good departure. The problem with informal bonuses is that they depend on the memory of whoever promised them. If the operator promises one in a conversation and doesn't write it down, it's easy for it to be forgotten or disputed later.

Recording the bonus inside the collaborator's account in Terra leaves a clear trail: what was promised, when, and why. That avoids awkward conversations weeks later about whether something was actually said.

What about commissions and payments between partners?

An operator doesn't just have guides, they also work with partners who bring in bookings and earn a commission for it. Terra includes these commissions and payments between partners within the same operations accounting, instead of splitting them into another system.

This matters because the question "who do I owe, and how much?" stops having two different answers depending on whether it's a guide or a commercial partner. Everything lives in the same place: the daily close, collaborator accounts and partner commissions.

Table: before and after centralizing the close

What does a full daily close look like with several guides?

Picture an operator in San Andrés with four snorkel guides working different shifts on a peak-season Saturday. Each guide finishes their departure and sends their report. Terra generates the settlement draft for each one, with the cash that came in, what was spent on boat fuel, and the corresponding receipts.

At the end of the day, the operator doesn't need to call four people to find out what happened. They review the four drafts, confirm them, and right there can see if any of those guides has a pending advance that should be deducted, or if one of them earned a bonus for closing an extra sale with a passenger. Everything stays inside the operations accounting, without moving a single piece of data to another sheet.

This is especially useful in peak season, when departure volume rises and the margin for error in a manual close multiplies with every extra guide brought on.

What information stays available to check later?

One advantage of having this centralized is that the operator can look back whenever needed. If a guide claims they're owed a bonus from two months ago, the answer doesn't depend on anyone's memory: it's in their account, with date and reason. If a partner asks about a pending commission, the operator doesn't have to dig through a weeks-old WhatsApp thread.

This also helps when the operator hands the close to an administrator. Instead of explaining by word of mouth how every exception works (who has an active loan, who has a pending bonus), the new person can see the real status of each account as soon as they log in.

How do you start using this if everything is currently in loose spreadsheets?

Steps to migrate the close to Terra

1. Make a first record of the current situation: what you owe each guide (advances, active loans) and what bonuses are still pending.
2. Load those initial balances into each collaborator's account inside Terra.
3. Starting with the next departure, ask each guide to submit their report when the tour ends.
4. Review and confirm the settlement drafts Terra builds from that report.
5. Use the operations accounting to record new advances, loans or bonuses as they happen, not at month-end.

This order avoids the cold start of trying to reconstruct months of history: you begin from a clear initial balance, and from there everything gets recorded in real time.

If your operation is already in peak season and the daily close is turning into an endless nightly task, this guide connects directly with Run a Tour Company in High Season: Calendar to Settlement, which covers how to organize the whole season's operation, not just the cash close.

What to do now

Run your first close with the settlement panel on your next departure, and load any active advances or loans with your guides right there: in a single departure you'll see whether the automatic draft saves you the time you currently spend reconstructing the cash box by hand.