Use the Resource Manager to Best Organize and Manage Your Reservations
What is the Resource Manager?
Using the resource manager is the go to move in order to maximize organization and management of your reservations. The resource manager creates resources for your activities, and items within those resources. Those resources can then automatically be tracked if they are being used, when they're being used, by how many people, etc. With this information, you can prevent double bookings, create buffers, and more all automatically.
For example, there is a bowling alley with 12 lanes. Within the resource manager, create the resource "lanes" and create 12 items named "lane" 1-12. Attaching these resources to packages that use those resources allow them to be tracked. If a guest purchases "general reservation" that takes up 2 lanes, those 2 lanes are now considered blocked and cannot be used - your software now knows you only have 10 lanes available. Even further, if all 12 lanes are taken up from 1-2pm, no reservations will be shown on your reservation page from 1-12 since all the resources are being used.
How to Create Resources
You'll first have to find your way to the resource manager
Venue -> Venue Selection -> Resources
To add a new resource, in the top right you'll click Actions -> Add Resource Category. A resource category is the entire category of your resources, for example you wouldn't name this "lane 1," you would name it "bowling lanes."
Once created, you'll see your resource category below. To add your items, you'll one by one click Add Resource within the resource category. Name them accordingly, for example "Lane 1."
Note, priority means how high in your resource category the item will appear. An item with a 100 priority will appear higher in the list than a 99 priority. This is used for organization.
Once created, congrats! The app now knows you have these resources, but they are not attached to anything. Next we will attach these resources to packages that use them.
Connect to Packages
Make your way over to the Packages tab. From here, find the packages you have created that uses the resources you just created. For our example, any packages that use bowling lanes we will want to attach these resources to. Click to open the package.
The first thing you'll want to do is make the schedule that appears to the guest dependent on your resources. For example, the schedule will know not to show a 2:00 reservation if no lanes are available. To do this, within the Schedule module, open the schedule you have created for the package.
Under Schedule Type, change the option from Custom Availability to Based on Resource Manager. Click save. Now your schedule is dependent on resources, but it does not yet know which resources it is dependent on.
Now scroll down to Assign Resource Category. This is where you are going to tell the package which resource it is dependent on. Choose the resource it is using, for our example we will click bowling lanes. Click save, and boom! Your package now automatically understands it's resources and schedules accordingly.
Further Knowledge
The Host App is a great use of the resource manager. Within the host app, you can visually see resources being used in a calendar view. Within the host app, you can create, view, modify, or cancel reservations within all of your resource categories easily. You can also create "Blocks" which prevent resources from being able to be booked on certain days at certain times, an extremely useful feature. For example, bowling leagues every Tuesday. You can create a block for every Tuesday on lanes 1-4 which prevent those lanes from being scheduled.
You can also add multiple resources to a package. For example, if you have a party package that uses lanes and a party room as a resource, you can add both those resources to the package.