Newsletter 17/5/2014

Two problems fixed

Waitlist Bookings Invoicing

Waitlist bookings invoicing is now handled a little differently.  The problem occurred if a WAITLIST booking was changed to TENATITVE or CONFIRMED, then back to WAITLIST then back to TENTATIVE or CONFIRMED.  This would happen when a booking is placed into WAITLIST in order to free up a room or rooms, to allow shuffling of bookings to exchange rooms.  It’s only necessary to do this maneouvre if all rooms are booked, of course.  When moving from WAITLIST to TENTATIVE or CONFIRMED, an invoice was generated.  So in the problem situation, two (or more) invoices would be generated.

The  fix was to create all WAITLIST bookings originally with the admin price set to zero.  The change means that when you move a WAITLIST booking to TENTATIVE or CONFIRMED, you have to copy the calculated price into the admin price field, to force an invoice to be generated.

Existing WAITLIST bookings have been modified to have a zero admin price, so you don’t need to go back and fix anything, just follow the new procedure.

Guest and Admin comments disappearing

A sharp-eyed booking officer noticed that when admin edits a booking, any notes by the guest or by admin were removed.  This was not a good thing, so we fixed it and released the new code to your site today.

The bug was introduced on 10/2/2014, and would have affected any bookings edited by admin since that date, if they had guest or admin notes in them.  We apologise for this, but the only suggestion we have is to exercise care in case anything critical was noted there.  The guest notes would have been visible on first viewing the booking, and bookings not edited will still have their notes.

In most cases, the guest notes would have been included in the email received by the admin officer when the booking was made.  We have checked your email formats and if this information was not being included, we have added it.

Better news

If you are a book-by-bed lodge, there is a new page to assist with allocating bookings to rooms.  It’s on the admin menu, bookings -> allocate rooms.  We plan to add a drag-and-drop feature for allocating bookings to rooms in time for the 2015 season.  For now, the dislay of bookings may be useful.  Also you can click through to an individual booking and allocate rooms there.  Rooms allocated then show up on the printable report designed to be posted on the lodge’s noticeboard.

We have improved the payment pages for members, to guide them to the page that shows all their bookings.
Payment methods advice now includes the booking ID as the reference, (exception, when paying outstanding member balance).

Book-by-room lodges can now set a maximum number of beds available in the lodge (in case your rooms have more beds than you can legally occupy).  This is set on the season page, so it can vary between seasons.  Bookings are rejected at step 2 if this limit is exceeded.  If you set a limit, the booking matrix (step 1) shows admin the remaining number of available beds for each day – members do not see this. (update – available beds is now shown on step 1 to all users).

A small number of our clubs include all family members as separate entries in their member database.  For these clubs, there is now an option to automatically select the appropriate tariff when a name is entered on step 2 of the booking process.  If a name is not matched from the membership database, only non-member tariffs are selectable.  This requires some setting up, so get in touch if you want to use this feature.