Autumn Update — The Booking Factory
Well its been a busy 2 months since we updated you on our progress, lots of changes are happening constantly and while I let you know of the bigger ones there are many smaller things you may not have noticed.
Siteminder Connection Live
Siteminder testing took longer than anticipated but it’s live for 1 week with our live test property. We hit a few snags early on with credit card information but we are error free for 7 days currently. Please let me know if you need Siteminder.
Huge Tax Update
Our current tax system is quite basic and works with most countries in Europe including city taxes. The problem we have is for unique cases such as Africa and other parts of the world where there are some crazy complex rules. With the update that will come next week we will be able to choose what tax will affect each product.
You can attach a tax/fee or city tax to any rate plan or extra. You can delete taxes from rates and products also. Theres also special rules so we can support the UK long stay VAT rules where there is no VAT after 28 days.
Look at our support page on how to set up uk long stay tax settings: https://intercom.help/HotelPMS/property-management-system/setting-up-uk-long-stay-vat-rule
New Report: Debtors Report
A few hotels have asked for this report to keep track of who has paid and not paid and breakdown in terms on timeframes. We listened and the report is now live.
New Report: In House Report
Another report to show who is currently staying at the property, handy for emergency or other admin reasons.
Major Changes to Extras
We had some big changes to extras with groups/categories. and the way they are added to a rate plan and shown on the invoice. Full post on this can be read here:
http://intercom.help/HotelPMS/property-management-system/extras-with-rate-plans-explained
and here:
http://intercom.help/HotelPMS/property-management-system/setting-up-extras
Reactions Speed Update: Our reaction automations used to trigger every 10 minutes, this caused a lot of problems for users who thought it wasnt working properly when testing their automations. This has now been lowered to every 1 minute.
Occupancy Report: We updated this report to include a full room breakdown also
Deeplink Guide: We have made a guide for website developers and techno savvy people to how to deeplink into our booking engine: https://github.com/BookingFactory/BookingEngineDeepLink
Vertical Booking Improvements: We hit some early errors with our vertical booking integration in the way we handle modifications and multiple room bookings. These have been fixed and we continue to monitor the situation.
Of course while this has been going on theres like 50 small tiny things that have been tweaked or fixed within our platform. As always please let us know of any bug no matter how small so we can all get a better solution.
Roadmap:
It’s always difficult to say what the next things we are working on as our roadmap changes direction constantly. But here is what is happening next:
Payment Express Integration: A few of you wanted payment express as they work with many merchant accounts, this solution should also be cheaper than Strip & Braintree if you process a lot of cards online.
Rate Improvements: We have a huge change coming to improve our rate plan functionality with very advanced options often found in the more advanced PMS/CRS.
Self Check-in: We are looking to add a self checkin portal soon to speed up and automate check-ins.
Guest Portal: Part of our work in automating the hotels workload is having a guest portal so they can manage their own bookings.
Xero: Xero is still on the roadmap but has been pushed back slightly
Smart Locks: We are adding some smart lock integrations soon
