FastTrac: Facility Reservation Auto Cancellations
Summary
Join Brian Hatch as he highlights the Facility Reservation Auto Cancellation feature that can help free up facilities that are in a tentative status for new reservations if the patron fails to make payment according to your policy.
Video
Transcript
00:00:05:06 - 00:00:26:05
Brian Hatch
In this video, we're going to review the topic of the facility reservation auto Cancel program in RecTrac. This is a program that can help manage your reservations if you have a policy of, ah, payment being required either x amount of days after the initial reservation is booked or X amount of days before the reservation actually takes place.
00:00:26:07 - 00:00:52:03
Brian Hatch
To access this program, you can go to facility management. I already have that open under more at the bottom. There's the reservation auto cancel option listed there. I have this open at the top in my example. I this is a policy specific to my shelter, so I only have the shelters in my database selected. If this was a module wide policy that applied to all reservations, you wouldn't have to select anything on the left.
00:00:52:03 - 00:01:21:01
Brian Hatch
You could just turn on the used facility range on the right, on the right hand side with the status to include. So you have the option for hold or tentative. Tentative is what I use my database. I have a cancellation option. So this is where you can choose whether you want this to apply X amount of days after the initial reservation is made or booked or logged, or you can do the days before the reservation actually takes place, if that's how your policy works and that works hand in hand with the number of days setting below there.
00:01:21:01 - 00:01:49:29
Brian Hatch
So on my database, my policy would be seven days after initially booked the reservation payment as required before your reservation will be canceled. The process option to left. You could run this in journal only just to produce a report or you can run process and journal or process only to actually run the cancellation process. And this is something I have set up that runs every single day in my database to do that seven day check prior.
00:01:50:02 - 00:02:11:03
Brian Hatch
And to highlight this example, I'm going to go to global sales at the top, already have a household selected. I go to purchase history and you can see the reservation that's already on the books listed here. So that's a reservation. That's actually it was made seven days prior to today and already has a tentative status. And hand-in-hand with that it has a total do that I haven't made a payment on.
00:02:11:03 - 00:02:36:24
Brian Hatch
So it's still tentative. So if we go back to the reservation auto Cancel program, I'm going to hit process at the bottom and this is where you can ultimately do the schedule step. So once you're comfortable and you've done some testing and you see the process all the way through, this is where you probably ultimately go to automate this and have it run every single day automatically in a scheduled event form.
00:02:36:27 - 00:03:01:07
Brian Hatch
In my case, I want to run on demand and just say, run the reservation auto cancel and I'll preview the report and I'll get sent off to the server. And once it's completed, it'll produce the PDF for me. And this gives me some details about what reservations are actually picked up with those parameters. I'm going to go and close that out and I must switch back to global sales.
00:03:01:07 - 00:03:28:22
Brian Hatch
Let's go back to our household where we originally had our tentative reservation. If I hit refresh and purchase history now, we'll see that reservation actually drops off. It's still in purchase history. It's just hidden underneath the canceled status. I turn on canceled. I can see there's my reservation again. It's been canceled based on that program. And the space is now freed up for another customer and ultimately book and use and the couple of notes on this solution.
00:03:28:22 - 00:04:00:06
Brian Hatch
So one, if I go to my facility tab, if you're going with this solution, you're likely going to want to use screen designed to set your status to be tentative by default. So any reservation you make will be a tentative status and then you're going to be using the payment profile setting typically where as payments are made either at the end of this process or on a separate transaction, either through RecTrac or through WebTrac, the tentative status will get switched to a firm status and that setting is on your payment profile.
00:04:00:09 - 00:04:27:12
Brian Hatch
Someone switch over to profile assignments and I'm going to go to my default payment profile here and you can see the toggle here on the right hand side update facility reservation status to firm on payment. So if this is turned on on your payment profiles, that's where RecTrac will automatically switch that status for you, helping you keep those up to date.
00:04:27:15 - 00:04:51:05
Brian Hatch
And the other note I would say that most customers would probably want to do if this was their policy and process they want to put in place would probably also do add a RecConnect reminder for customers. So if i switch over to my facility reservation report. I would set up typically a RecConnect for my shelter reservations and probably only run this obviously for my FIR or my tentative status based on this example.
00:04:51:08 - 00:05:12:26
Brian Hatch
So my tentative reservations and then based on the transaction date for my policy, I'd have this run and I could set up multiple runs of this if I want to get multiple warnings, know X amount of days after the initial reservation has been made up until the point where they are ultimately either paid for or then canceled at that point.
00:05:12:28 - 00:05:16:25
Brian Hatch
And that is the review of the reservation auto cancel process in RecTrac.