what is GBAL mode?
what is GBAL mode?GBAL mode stands for:
"Generic Booking Allocate Later"
N.B.this is an optional premium feature
It is a powerful feature that large rental operations like to use. For example let's say you have 20 identical medium mountain bikes. You take a booking for 10 of these bikes on 1st May. You just want to make sure you don't run out of this kind of bike. But you don't know, or care, specifically which of your medium mountain bikes you put them on. This is because you don't know which of your mountain bikes will be ready or accessible at that time. So you use GBAL to book 10 medium mountain bikes.
GBAL lets you take bookings generically and allocate later (we also refer to this as "just in time allocation").
Please note that smaller operations may want to deal exclusively with specific bikes, which is slightly easier to understand, though not quite as powerful. In that case simply turn off GBAL.
Note, that you can allocate a specific bike at any time after you make the rental ticket. You can even not allocate if you don't get round to it for whatever reason. See here:
If you want to keep the ability take GBAL bookings, but only give it to more experienced staff members then you can turn this feature on and off on a per-user basis:
Finally, don't confuse GBAL with the online booking experience (OBW). GBAL relates to the back-office function. Your online bookers will always be making generic bookings. This is because they don't care about specific bikes, they simply want to know you have what they want when they want it.
This means that by default your OBW-rental tickets will be generic when they are made. So you will be responsible for allocating specific bikes at some later stage. If you don't want to be bothered with this decision, you can get BRM to do this automatically with the auto-allocate feature.
Jan 2017Your product lines (aka generic buckets) are now accessed via buttons, not checkboxes. This means you can select them more than once to fill up your 'basket';
related article: