Problem Solving - beware of changing your fleet if you have lots of reservations
Sure, you can add bikes, even remove bikes. But you need to think twice before making changes that will result in structural changes to your fleet.
Imagine that you are getting close to your season. You have taken quite a few reservations, and you have GBAL enabled, so that these reservations are held as generic bookings.
Then someone says hey, lets list all our bikes as 'one size' rather than:
S,M,L,XL
(give you more flexibility allocating bikes right?)
Well, the problem is that BRM keeps track of all your reservations, and each one is MAPPED to a product line (or generic). So if you change the nature of your product lines you will get a bunch of broken links. (Reservations will point to product lines that no longer exist.)
If this does happen BRM will pick up the problem in the overnight integrity check and send you warnings. You can then fix each reservation manually by swapping in specific bikes (sometimes you can even revert your fleet back to before you broke it)
Here are the elements that go into defining your product lines:
- Bike Type (actually what you define as ultra-generic in your spreadsheet)
- Bike Frame (Male, Female or Unisex)
- Bike Size
because these 3 elements together define if a bike is interchangeable. Therefore if you change any of these elements beware you will create new product lines (generics)
So the best time to make fleet structure changes is after your season! (i.e. when you have no live reservations - or at least very few!)