Hello everyone, and welcome to another weekly product update here at Tern!

‍

Email Collaboration on Trips

First up, we’re thrilled to announce a major enhancement in how email collaboration works within trip planning!

Last week, we launched the ability for everyone working on a trip to view all emails related to that trip—a significant milestone in improving collaboration between advisors. But now, as of this week, you can send new emails directly from a trip as well. 🚀

Here’s a quick example of how this plays out: let’s say you’re a virtual assistant, agency owner, or another advisor collaborating on a trip. You can now:

• Access all trip emails: view all emails that have been sent from, or tagged to, the trip to ensure you have all the relevant information you need.
• Send new emails from shared trips: jump in to send emails to travelers, reply to threads you have started, and use your stored email templates as needed.

This feature is a major leap forward for team collaboration, making it easier to step in when needed—whether you're covering for someone on leave or working on a trip together.

One note: at the moment, you can’t reply to threads you didn’t initiate, nor can you CC other trip collaborators directly on those emails. But don’t worry, we’re keeping an eye on your feedback and may invest in these additions down the road! Learn more about email collaboration.

‍

Date Adjustment for Payments

Another highly requested update we’ve rolled out is the ability to adjust the date of a payment. Previously, when you marked something as paid in the booking and pricing tab, the system would automatically timestamp the payment with the date you clicked "paid." This wasn’t ideal for situations where the payment was made earlier, but you were only catching up on logging it later.

Now, you can backdate payments to accurately reflect when they were made. This update is a win for keeping your records straight and ensuring the correct information is shared with clients.

‍

Marking Non-Commissionable Bookings

Next up is a feature aimed at improving your commission tracking. We heard loud and clear that there are times when you need to track activities (like flights or stays) for sales purposes, but you’re not expecting commission from them. In the past, you had to set these bookings to $0 expected commission, which still made them appear in your commission reports.

Not anymore! 🎉 Now, you can simply mark activities as non-commissionable, and they won’t show up in your commission tracking dashboard. If you ever need to see these bookings, you can check the box for "Include Not Commissionable Bookings," but otherwise, they’ll be neatly out of your way. 

‍

Small But Mighty: Quality of Life Improvements

We’ve also made some smaller but impactful updates:

• Unclaimed bookings are now clickable: You can drill into them to review the underlying statement or claim them if they’ve been updated. If it’s been a while since you’ve checked out agency commission reconciliation features, you can learn more here!
• Mobile app improvements: We’ve updated the way trips are ordered in the app—travelers will now see their trips ordered by start date, making it easier to stay organized. We're also exploring ways to hide archived or canceled trips to give travelers a clearer view of their upcoming journeys.
• Bug fixing! Of course, no update would be complete without mentioning the continuous bug fixes we’ve been rolling out. One of the key fixes this week was related to itinerary template previews—cover photos and statements weren’t displaying accurately, but that’s been resolved! We’re always tackling bugs to ensure Tern works smoothly, so keep that feedback coming!

That’s it for this week’s update. We’re excited about the improvements and can't wait to hear your thoughts as you start using these new features. Keep the feedback coming, and we’ll keep working on making Tern even better.

Until next time—happy trip planning! ✈️