Hire products are a type of operator product that only requires a resource. One or more customers can be booked on a resource, e.g. a private pool. 


Hire group (referred to throughout the set-up article as 'HireGroup') is used in scenarios where one or more people book a resource, but individuals can choose different options per person. E.g. a couple's treatment takes place in one room (the resource), but each individual may opt to have a different treatment. It is important to note that although you can manage treatments using Hire groups, you cannot assign therapists like you can using our Appointment Scheduler.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Set up hire products

Setup resources

Setup product relationships 

Troubleshooting


Set up hire products

Step 1: Create the product

  1. Open the Operator products screen under the Reservations menu > Product setup tab.
  2. Click the Add button and enter the details as follows, then click Save.
    • Code (max 10 alphanumeric characters, no spaces)
    • Product name 
    • Set the product type to Hire.
    • Select your company contact from the Operator droplist
    • In the Account column, select your direct internal account.
    • Set the online policy to Internal.
  3. Once your product has been added, update the following attributes and scheduler details, then press Save.
    • Add a Description which will show online for Hire type products only
    • Add a Grouping for ease of reporting
    • Set the Duration (required) e.g. ‘1h’ / ‘30m’ / ‘1h30m’ which determines how long the product will take to complete. If you add a +, the system will automatically add a 10 or 15-minute cleaning time to the product which can be removed when booking if desired.
    • Restrict times: comma-separated list of time(s) (ranges) the product IS available for. E.g.: 09:00-12:00,21:00-22:00. When nothing is entered, it is always available.
    • Display colour: The colour of the booking when it appears on the Hire screen.
    • Keywords: if you are setting up a HireGroup product, the keywords determine the product customers are booking online. E.g.: “HireGroup: Pax=1(1 person), duration=2h(2 hour)” means that when 1 person is selected, and 2 hours for the treatment, this product is being booked.
    • Restrict days: Days of the week the product IS available for. When none are selected, all days apply.
    • Start and end date: the product will be only available between the selected dates
    • Time blocks: used to determine if a booking can be booked over multiple availability blocks or not. If left blank, it can be booked anywhere. For more information, see the Availability section.
    • Transport product: if the product has a corresponding shuttle pickup, select the appropriate product from the list.


Step 2: Set up the price code

A Price code allows you to allocate pricing to your hire/HireGroup products. To set up a new price code:

  1. Open the Price code screen 
  2. Add a new row by clicking the green + button at the top of the grid.
  3. Fill in the Price code (10 letters or less, no space, apostrophes or other symbols). 
  4. Fill in the Description of the price code and select whether it can be Discounted or is liable for Commission by ticking the boxes.
  5. Set the online policy to Internal only. If the policy is set to inactive, the price code will be hidden by default.
  6. Click Save and close the screen.

    Add a new price code


Step 3: Set up price options

Hire products can only be set up with the price option Adult & Child. Any other option types you offer e.g. locals, seniors, students etc will need to be managed with a promotion or discount. 

Follow the steps carefully to configure a Hire product price option as the naming of the option is important.

  1. Open the Price option screen, then click Add. 
  2. For a hire product, enter your price option code, then add a description using the following naming convention:

    CodeDescriptionPlaces
    1AdultAdult1
    2Adult2 Adults2
    3Adult3 Adults3
    1ChildChild1
    2Child2 Children
    		2


    Having a number + ‘Adult’ in the code is how the price is calculated for hire products as often prices aren’t the same for each person you add on to a pool booking (e.g. the first adult is $119, extra adults are $39). The same rule applies to children. If children are always the same addon price, you’ll only need one price option with the code ‘CHILD’. 

  3. If you have the same price per adult. you can use the standard 'Adult', 'child', 'senior' etc format. Note: this only applies if using the itinerary screen. 
  4. If you are setting up price options for your HireGroup product, e.g. for a couples massage, each person can choose their own type of massage such as deep tissue or a relaxing massage.
  5. Set the price option type to Person or if you are wanting to set up optional extras, e.g. wine & cheese, romantic decorations, etc, then use the type addon.
    • If you want customers to have the ability to add unlimited addons, you can set this against the price option under Online properties > Online attributes.. Set it to read: selection=unlimited
    • Note: this only applies if you are using the latest version of ecommerce. 
  6. The Order is not important for hire products, but if you are setting up HireGroup products, set the order as you would like the options to appear in the list.
  7. Edit policy: if you want to be able to change the price of this option in the booking screen, set this to ‘Internal’. If you don’t want it to be editable, set it to ‘no edit’
  8. Save your changes, then update the following attributes:
  9. Restrict day: the days of the week the option IS available for. When none are selected, all days apply.
  10. Restrict time: comma-separated list of time(s) (ranges) the option IS available for. E.g.: 09:00-12:00,21:00-22:00. When nothing is entered, it is always available.


Step 4: Set up pricing

In the Seasonal pricing screen, you assign prices to the price options against a price code. See related article for details. 

For HireGroup and addon options, this is quite straightforward, and you enter the price for 1 unit/person per option. 

For the hire products you will need to set it up as follows:

  • 1ADULT = price of pool for 1 adult. If your standard pool price includes 2 adults, make this price the same as for 2 adults.
  • 2ADULT = total price of pool for 2 adults
  • 3ADULT = total price of pool for 3 adults


Step 5: Building the product

To put together the product & pricing, please follow the process for building the product. However, please note that you do not require a service (unless you use tablet check-in) and that the Scheduler products can only have one component.


Step 6: Configure product groups

You will need to set up product groups to order them in your product tree, as well as for navigation online.

  1. In IBIS, navigate to System > Online groups > Online product groups.
  2. Click Create new and enter the details as follows, then click Save.
    • Group Code: alpha-numeric code consisting of a maximum of 10 characters (can include a dash). For Hire products, this HAS to start with the word “hire”, e.g. “HIRE-Pool”. 
    • Group name: This will display in your product tree as well as for customers online.
    • Operator: if you have multiple operators set up in your system, select the appropriate one.
    • Description: this can be seen online by customers.
    • Grouping, Start sector and End sector can be ignored.
  3. To add products to a group, click on Edit on the group you just added, then tick the products in the grid that belong to that group.
  4. Save your changes at the bottom of the grid.


Setup resources

Your resources are your rooms, private pools, boats or tables.

  1. Open the Resources screen, then click Add 
  2. Enter the resource Name, e.g. “Pool 1” 
  3. The type can remain standard.
  4. Enter the maximum places for the resource
  5. You can also add a display group, this allows you to only view selected resource groups in the Hire scheduler screen. Display groups can be added as text. If a display group already exists, you can select it from a list.



  6. Click Save


Setup product relationships 

To determine which pools/rooms (Resources) can be utilised for specific products:

  1. Open the Product relationships screen under the Operations menu.
  2. Select the Products, then tick the boxes for the appropriate Resources.
  3. This screen auto-saves, so just close it when you’re done.


Hire availability set up options

There are a couple of different options you can choose to set up your availability. If you’re not sure what suits your operation best, talk to us to discuss. You can also set some products up one way, and others another way.


  1. Free for all: By opening up availability in a single block, you can essentially allow a booking to be made at any time. It depends on your Scheduler settings whether a product is available to be booked every 10 minutes or 15 minutes. 
    • Pros: This is the best option for you if you have a lot of walk-ins wanting a pool, as you can book them into the nearest time slot. It also gives the customers a lot of flexibility over booking times. 
    • Cons: You might end up with unusable gaps in your availability unless you actively look at your bookings and move them around between resources to maximise capacity. The list of times a customer can book online can be quite long and overwhelming. E.g. showing 15-minute gaps between bookings when allowing customers to choose their own times.



  2. Managed: If you rather have set product times, you can set up individual time blocks. You can even specify against a product if you want it to be bookable over one or multiple time blocks, in order to deal with different durations of a product. 
    • Pros: This is a good way to maximise your capacity as you won’t end up with unusable breaks. It gives the customer a clear list of bookable times online (e.g. on the hour). It’s easier on the staff if they know the schedule and when to clean what resource. 
    • Cons: It’s not very flexible, if you have walk-in customers who want to go into a pool right now, you have customers showing up early or late to their booking times and you still want to honour the full product duration and the list of times a customer can book for online can be quite long and overwhelming. E.g. In the image below you will see the following: 
      • Double rooms are set up with hourly availability, you can tell by the faint border on the individual time blocks. The 2-hr products are still bookable because it’s specified that they can be booked on 2-time blocks.
      • Hot tubs are set up with availability breaks between bookings. In this case, you can only book 1-hr products.
      • In both cases you can stagger the time blocks if you want, so not everyone is booked in at the same time.


Step 1: Add availability

You set up staff and resource availability in the Scheduler setup screen under the Operations menu.

  1. Navigate to Operations > Scheduler setup. By default, the screen opens showing you the current day, and all staff members. Change to the Resources tab to see your pools/rooms.
  2. To set a time frame, hold down your left mouse button at the start time, then drag it down to the finish time. It will automatically set the availability to “Available_online”. Changes are saved automatically.

If you want to copy a time frame-block, hold down CTRL on your keyboard, click down on the block and move your mouse in any direction.


 


Step 2: Set the availability policies

If you want to change the availability you can right-click and select a different policy. These are the various policies available:

  • Available online: bookings made online on your e-commerce site can go into this resource.
  • Available internal: bookings made by your staff can go into this resource, and will not be available online.
  • Unavailable options for resources: Break, Reserve, Maintenance, Transit, Cleaning.

Once availability has been set (including the unavailable statuses), you’ll be able to see the resource on the Hire screen. That means you will not see resources that have no availability set. If a resource is on reserve, you can change its status to available so it can be used for bookings.


Step 3: Copy template days

Once you’ve created a day or weekly roster for your resources, you can use the Copy function to apply this over a specific time frame. To copy a template:

  1. Click the Copy button on the bottom left of the screen.
  2. The Start date is the next day following your template, but this can be amended of course.
  3. The End date needs to be amended to whenever you want your pre-planned roster to end.
  4. Select the days to copy into:
    1. If you’re applying a week template, leave all days ticked
    2. If you’re applying a day template, tick the days of the week you want it to copy on. This can be useful if someone has the same working hours all week, so you can set the first day manually, and then copy it over the workdays for one week. Following that you can then select the whole week to copy over several weeks. 
    3. Click Copy. You’ll see a message with the result of your copy. If you amended an existing roster, it won’t copy the time blocks which are the same.



Troubleshooting

My hire product is not showing any available spaces even though I have set up availability for it? 

Ensure the product duration matches the available time you have created in the Scheduler set up screen. If the product duration is longer than the space available, then this is why the product will not show as available.