Newsletter 4/8/2008

Recent Enhancements

These changes are due to go into your system on Wednesday 6/8/2008.

MOTO credit card

You can now process mail or phone credit card bookings (MOTO) by adding Paypal buttons to the booking edit screen.  If you allow deposits, both buttons will show (pay deposit, pay full amount).

Bug fixes

If you use the price influencer there was a bug if the administrator edited a booking – the tariff would change, as the price influencer was not included in the recalculation of the tariff.  This is fixed in this round of changes.

If you are wondering what the price influencer is – it enables you to charge non-members a higher tariff on certain days of the week.  You can apply this rule to any season individually, and you can have different rules for different seasons.

A small bug that no-one except us noticed was happening if an abandoned booking occupied the same room/day as any other booking.  The matrix would show a tentative booking with no mouse-over details.  If this has happened to you then forget it – fixed.

Coming soon

We are working on adding Paypal buttons to allow any guest to make payments after their initial booking is made.  For example, a tentative booking with no payment can be paid for later, on your website.

You might know that a booking can be cancelled by entering the Booking ID and contact name.  The new payment buttons will be accessed in the same manner.  If deposits apply then the appropriate buttons will show.  If payment has already been made in full, no buttons will appear but a reassuring message will tell guests that their payment is already made.

As you may know, you can restrict access to various admin pages based on the access level of the logged in site user, between members, staff and administrators.  Soon we will link up the admin menus so that pages that are not authorised will not appear in the menu.  Currently this is achieved by us manually editing the menu for you, which gets in the way of updates!

Also coming soon is an enhancement to the control you have over bookings start and finish days.  For example, we have one lodge that allows bookings (in peak seasons) only for 2, 5 or 7 days with start days being Friday night or Sunday night only and exit days being Sunday or Friday only.  Another lodge requires bookings that include Friday to also include Saturdday and vice versa – so their rule is “bookings may start on any day except Saturday and departures may be on any day except Saturday”.

Let us know what other features you might find useful.  We will do our best to include these into our work schedule.