You're not selling stock — you're selling someone else's
A retail business buys stock, marks it up, and sells it — cost of goods sold is a straightforward concept. A travel agency rarely owns what it sells: a hotel room, a seat, a tour guide's time all belong to a supplier, and the agency's role is to sell access to it, sometimes for a margin, sometimes for a commission paid by the supplier after the fact.
That distinction means a chart of accounts copied from a retail or trading business will misrepresent a travel agency's actual financial position — treating commission income like sales revenue, or failing to separate what's owed to a supplier from what's already been collected from a customer.
The accounts a travel agency actually needs
At minimum, travel-specific accounting needs to separate service fee income from commission income, track supplier payables per booking rather than as one lump balance, and handle multi-currency supplier costs against AED-denominated customer invoices — none of which a generic retail-oriented chart of accounts is built to do cleanly.
What generic accounting software gets wrong
Most accounting packages can technically be configured to approximate this, with enough custom categories and manual discipline. In practice, that configuration rarely survives staff turnover or busy periods — the shortcuts people take under pressure default back to treating every invoice the same way, which is exactly what breaks travel-specific reporting.
How Muhasib is built differently
Muhasib's accounting engine treats commission income, service fees, and supplier payables as distinct, travel-native concepts from the ground up — so the reports a travel agency actually needs come out of the system by default, not through months of custom configuration.