Handling events
Imagine you're running a group event, like a charity bike ride, and are taking reservations from lots of individuals to rent your bikes on the same day.
In BRM a reservation consists of one or more bikes booked for the SAME DURATION. So you have two optoins as to how best to tackle this scenario.
You might want to create just 1 reservation, and call it something like 'Big Charity Ride' and in it have all the bikes that are booked.
- each bike then represents not just a bike, but the client who will be using it.
- when you receive a new booking for the event, you add in a new bike to the reservation and write in customer name. You can customise how your reservations look (on a per type basis) so you can have fields for your EVENT bookings like 'paid' and 'telephone number'. You can also check in any bikes early.
- in this way you can track individual customers inside a larger reservation.
OR, you might prefer to create one reservation per client on that day. It's perhaps more work to manage it in this way, but it will give you great control over tracking payments, customers etc. If you do manage your event in this way you will probably want to take advantage of the 'Group' feature within BRM. This is a facility that lets you 'tag' a reservation with a particular group name, for searching. For example you might have 50 different reservations for the same day, each representing a different person renting a bike for the same event. But you could then put in group name of "MyEvent". Then if you search for "MyEvent" in findReservations->search by Event you'll find all 50:
N.B. you may also want to see the group tag article