Making tariffs easier
A new tariff system is now in test mode. Gone are percentages and separate forms for weekday/weekend tariffs. Gone also is the limit of two room-types (e.g. used as en-suite and shared-facilities), there is now no limit - each room-type gets separate tariffs.
You can also choose the tariff method for each room-type for each season, the three methods are "flat rate", "by room occupancy" and "empty bed tariff". Note that book-by-bed lodges can only use flat rate.
Tariffs are now entered as a "tariff set" which can be called up by any season. So you only need to enter rates once, e.g. for the shoulder season, then apply those rates to the early and late shoulder.
New clubs starting this year will help us bed down the new system, as they check and test their setups before going live. The old tariff system continues to run at least for 2016. However if you haven't yet set up your tariffs for 2016 and any of the new features sound useful, let us know so we can help you over to the new system.
Child date of birth
Members can no longer update a child date-of-birth when they update their personal details. Admin can do so, and members are advised on their update screen to ask for this. This is to protect against children's birthdays being altered fraudulently.
You can also choose to capture age and gender on the booking forms now. If you do, members and their families will have this data automatically extracted from the membership database, non-member guests have to have these fields entered. This option is mainly useful for book-by-bed lodges when combining people from different bookings into one room.
Email formats
You now have more control over the formatting of the various emails. Via admin -> site config -> email details, near the top is a new field, you can enter CSS here which is included in all emails sent by the system (affects the HTML or rich-text version only). Here is an example of how this field can be used:
<style> table.statement{border:0; width:1000px;} table.statement th{font-weight: bold; border:1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding:1px 5px;} table.statement td{white-space:nowrap; border:1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding:1px 5px;} .debit{color: #FF0000;} .credit{color: #00FF00;}</style>
Reminder invoices and deposits
If your club takes deposits, you can now set a number of days prior to arrival when payment in full is required. This will trigger a reminder email (there is a new format for this, already in your email format page). Also, bookings made within this number of days won't show a deposit payment option, so you won't have to chase payment in full. You still need to chase people who paid a deposit and miss the deadline for payment in full, but with the new setting they will have already received a reminder email. You can set the number of days in admin -> site config -> payment details. The email format is there as well.
For clubs that don't take deposits, setting a non-zero value for the new parameter triggers the reminder email for unpaid bookings, so you can optionally send a reminder X days after a booking is made and/or Y days before the booking starts.
Book in the past
It's now forbidden for members to make bookings in the past. Sensible of course. Admin can do so, if you need to straighten your records. You control which admin level can do this via admin -> site config -> special access.
Insert transaction from search page
When searching for a member's transactions via admin -> member & transaction -> manage transactions, you can now click on "create transaction". If you have already searched for and found a member, this will pre-fill the transaction screen so you don't have to search for them again.
Members' preferred names
Member details includes a "preferred name" field. This hasn't had much use in the system but now is more useful. When making a booking, the booking contact name is by default copied from the member's details and now includes (preferred name) between given and surnames. You can also include the preferred name in the various email formats for "Dear %preferredname%" introductions. If the preferred name is absent (blank), the given name is provided instead.
Optional Extras
If you use Optional Extras, these are now split from accommodation tariffs. This mainly affects multi-lodge clubs, so that accommodation tariff types are now set for the club and not for individual lodges (but tariffs are set for lodges, just the tariff-types are uniform), meanwhile optional extras can be set per lodge. The reason we no longer allow tariff types to vary between lodges has to do with other options that rely on a single tariff type taxonomy.
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