Newsletter 29/4/2014

New Features for the New Season

Here’s some useful improvements to the system ready for this season – some more are in the works.  Some of the later ones might not be in your system yet, but will appear soon – or else get in touch if you want it sooner.

Also, book-by-room lodges now display faster.  both initially and also when you advance to later dates.  Anyone noticed the speed increase?

A wide range of special rules just for your club

The booking system already has a lot of rules you can apply to bookings.  Well, the range just got (almost) infinite.  We can now code rules to suit your specific needs.  This is custom software that applies just to your club.  It’s not free, but for a small once-off fee to cover the software development and testing, the system can automate a lot more rules, and give explanations to members (or the public) if they are stopped.

For example, some clubs restrict the number of weekends a member can book before a certain date.  You can also selectively relax rules, e.g.  allow single night weekend bookings if booked less than 14 days ahead.

You can also display a message according to special rules without stopping the booking, i.e.  just for information.

NOK optional

If you don’t use the Next Of Kin fields in member details, we suggested entering “N/A” in these fields.  You can now select an option to remove them from the system completely – let us know if you would like that for your system.

Members can update their details from step 3

Some, (not all) of each member’s details are used to pre-fill fields on step 3.  Members can now tick a box to have changes entered at step 3 saved to their member details record.  It’s optional, because for example, an email address might be entered just for this booking.

Step 4 made clearer

We have done some work on the payment options at step 4 to make them clearer.

Members view of their bookings now includes waitlist bookings

This was really an omission when we built the waitlist system.  Members have a page  Manage a Booking -> View my bookings which didn’t show WAITLIST bookings.  Now these show, but without the payment options that attach to TENTATIVE and CONFIRMED bookings.  (Yes, in some circumstances payments are still owing on a CONFIRMED booking – mostly applies to clubs that confirm bookings after a deposit is paid).

Downloading a member’s transactions

You can now download transactions for an individual member (over any date range) into a spreadsheet.  It’s on
admin -> member & transaction ->Transaction Report -> select the member you want and click “download report”.

For lodges booked by bed

Booked by bed? That’s where the booking matrix is one row per lodge and shows a number indicating how many vacant beds there are.  For these lodges, members now see a list of other members who have made bookings on each day.  This facility was always in the system for book-by-room lodges, now in book-by-bed as well.

Book-by-bed lodges also show correctly on the availability page – your club might not use this page, it’s a graphical per-lodge display of availability and waitlist, e.g.