If I may, please let me join this discussion and tell you what our requirements are:
We are running a park and have a picnic grove. Our office accepts reservations for picnic tables and grills ($5 each). Reservations are popular for Friday afternoons and weekends/holidays when we are often fully booked. We also charge a guest fee for all the non-member guests at the party.
Billing and payment tracking right now is possibly the least messy part of this: Our staff issues an invoice via Wild Apricot and tracks there whether payment has been made or not. In theory, this part of the picnic grove business should be tight. However, we enter the same data in two more systems: the "reservations book" - a simple calendar book where our park directors make notes about reservations (party, early or late afternoon shift, date, which and how many tables, grill yes or no) and a separate payment tracking system via excel, for each reservation day a worksheet to track invoiced and paid amounts. And all this is very removed from our quickbooks file, where we used to enter only bulk deposits of moneys into our checking accounts as "picnic grove" receipts...
What we would need would be a reservation system where (customizable) "resources" (our tables, grills, or other WA users' tennis courts or swimming lanes) would be paired with (customizable) time slots and could be reserved (and billed) to a member (creating an invoice and an "event" at the same time). We could then also take this "event" and add, to the same invoice, the guest fees.
It would be all really nice if we could have the reservations visualized on a map and jump on a calendar control to a day and flip to different time slots (in our case only two) to see availability.
Sure, customization of such a map might not be very easy but I can imagine that your programmers would love the challenge! Everything else should be very easy and would put our entire picnic grove business into one well-organized system.
dietmar
Hi Chief_Apricot,
If I may, please let me join this discussion and tell you what our requirements are:
We are running a park and have a picnic grove. Our office accepts reservations for picnic tables and grills ($5 each). Reservations are popular for Friday afternoons and weekends/holidays when we are often fully booked. We also charge a guest fee for all the non-member guests at the party.
Billing and payment tracking right now is possibly the least messy part of this: Our staff issues an invoice via Wild Apricot and tracks there whether payment has been made or not. In theory, this part of the picnic grove business should be tight. However, we enter the same data in two more systems: the "reservations book" - a simple calendar book where our park directors make notes about reservations (party, early or late afternoon shift, date, which and how many tables, grill yes or no) and a separate payment tracking system via excel, for each reservation day a worksheet to track invoiced and paid amounts. And all this is very removed from our quickbooks file, where we used to enter only bulk deposits of moneys into our checking accounts as "picnic grove" receipts...
What we would need would be a reservation system where (customizable) "resources" (our tables, grills, or other WA users' tennis courts or swimming lanes) would be paired with (customizable) time slots and could be reserved (and billed) to a member (creating an invoice and an "event" at the same time). We could then also take this "event" and add, to the same invoice, the guest fees.
It would be all really nice if we could have the reservations visualized on a map and jump on a calendar control to a day and flip to different time slots (in our case only two) to see availability.
Sure, customization of such a map might not be very easy but I can imagine that your programmers would love the challenge! Everything else should be very easy and would put our entire picnic grove business into one well-organized system.
Yours,
Dietmar