In this article
The Bookings for LS Central module is designed to manage reservations and appointments; the details facing the client, and to reserve the resources that are needed to perform the services.
These appointments or reservations may need to reserve multiple resources that are either automatically or manually assigned by the user. The resources have definitions of what they have to offer, and they can have priority settings which are then followed when the resources are automatically assigned for specific services.
The services are defined as products with assigned pricing and availability dates. The availability of the product depends on the availability of the resources that are required by the product definition.
Example: A spa treatment may require a certain therapist and a certain room (location). The therapist availability may depend on a roster schedule (for example in Staff Management), and the room availability depends on the spa opening hours. The Bookings module takes these definitions into consideration, calculates the product's availability, and presents availability based on interval settings.
Services can also be bundled and sold as a package. A package is basically a product consisting of multiple other products as components. The components can have special pricing when they are sold as part of a package.
All products, resources, activities, and reservations can have user-defined attributes for adding any type of additional information. Attributes can also be assigned based on product activity type, resource group, and reservation type, thus providing more specific settings for each category, rather than having all attributes on all products.
Resources can also be quantity-based (a fixed number of equipment, for example), or they can be available according to a specific date and time schedule.
Example: Trips or shows that are performed with a limited capacity on certain dates and times.
Human resources can be searched or filtered according to gender (if an activity or a client has gender preferences), or by attributes. Clients can have preferred resources assigned in each resource group: a spa client may have a favorite therapist or trainer, or a favorite room, for example. These preferred resources are then always selected as priority when an activity is confirmed, and, depending on availability, assigned automatically.
The Bookings module can also manage events:
- You can manage the reservation of dining or meeting rooms, any associated equipment, and have food and beverages (or any retail item) registered prior to the event.
- These services can then be finalized and invoiced at the POS after the event has been concluded.
- Events can also be quoted through a standard LS Central quote, and then be finalized using a standard LS Central invoice.
- The POS features can be used to select food and beverage products for the event, and then be pushed to the event reservation and added to the additional charges section.
- Deposits can be accepted and refunded.
Bookings can handle courses with a specific starting date and limited seat availability, and reserve resources according to a predefined schedule. Then each participant can be registered and payments finalized through the POS.
Examples of other Bookings tasks:
- Keep track of admission and issue paper tickets on script-based printers.
- Use Word template reports to define documents to be printed in association with the products being sold.
- E-tickets can be issued using the Word template mechanism.
- Any activity (a reservation or appointment) can trigger the issuing of tasks, which according to preset templates can be assigned to dates and times, prior to arrival, during stay, or after the activity is completed.
- These tasks can be assigned to specific employees and the manager can keep track of the task status in the Role Center. Cancellation fees can be assigned based on advance days/hour threshold settings.
-
The reservation features can also handle classes where you have a fixed schedule of individual sessions going on for a set period, and keep track of the necessary resources to perform the classes.
Bookings also supports full rental functionality, i.e. keeping track of rental unit registry with detail information about each rental unit and its current status, assigning units to rental contracts (reservations) and finally registering the returns and check for late rental fees. Rental processes are both supported as backend functionality as well as on the point of sale.
See also