On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 8:32 AM, John Locke <m...@freelock.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> While I haven't actually built something like this, we have done some
> preliminary planning and use case analysis on a couple different projects
> along these lines.
>
> I would suggest a couple terminology changes -- instead of individual
> units being "slots", they should be Inventory. E.g. a hotel has a room
> inventory.
>
> Slots refers to the time slots then.
>
> So you're missing a dimension in this problem, at least if you're trying
> to manage bookings.
>
> Fixed Assets -> Inventory (Rental, perhaps a different inventory than
> goods for sale)
>
That's what the slots approach is intended to solve. We could call that
"Rentals" instead of "inventory" to avoid confusion regarding the
accounting terms (and that would take the place of slots).
>
> Time slots for booking (hour, day, week, month, year) -> "Slots" define
> the granularity based on the business model
>
My initial thinking was that the services could handle that.
>
> Booking -> Service -- A booking consists of an inventory item and 1 or
> more consecutive slots. You might have a variety of services that can be
> used for booking -- an hourly rate, a daily rate, a weekly rate, a student
> rate, an employee rate, not to mention different prices for different
> inventory, or prices that change based on how far in advance they are
> purchased, etc.
>
For now (trying to keep this simple and reasonably achievable in the first
iteration), what about tying it to an order where other goods and services
can be added? I.e. we track the service rate with the rental in the rental
module and link to an order for other add-on services.
>
>
> I am unlikely to use this add-on, as we would just build it in Drupal and
> create an order/invoice in LSMB via a REST call. And we would build it to
> fit the needs of the specific business. But as far as I can tell,
> "inventory" "slots" and "bookings" have specific meanings in the
> rental/hospitality industry, so I would suggest adopting that terminology.
>
> Also, a "booking" makes a nice object to relate everything to, and might
> change your user stories a bit...
>
Yeah.
>
> With this model, it's fairly easy to pull up a screen showing all
> inventory available or booked in a grid showing your time period. But there
> are so many other variables to consider...
>
A calendar report would be good.
>
> -- is there a setup/cleanup time period necessary before or after a
> booking, before the next booking?
>
Good point. This would need to be set.
>
> -- Deposit management
>
This is a more general problem we need to address anyway. Not sure *when*
we can address it though. A deposit is basically a prepayment into a
liability account. I would prefer to have better prepayment handling in
the financial rewrite and see where we need to go from there.
>
> -- filters for inventory type (e.g. 2 beds vs 1 bed vs suite)
>
>
> -- handling non-consecutive slots (e.g. teach a class in a room every
> Tuesday evening) -- conflict detection
>
> -- multiple configurations -- e.g. the banquet room that can be split into
> multiple small rooms rented individually or combined into a single big
> room, or room blocks in a hotel, reserving a floor at a time for a specific
> group
>
>
> ... those are the variations that come to mind off the top of my head. I
> would suggest if you have a specific customer you're building it for,
> coming up with a generically applicable solution is going to be...
> challenging.
>
>
> So for me, what would be most useful to have in LSMB is really good
> deposit management, and possibly asset management of the rental inventory.
> The actual booking system to my mind has too much variation, but there's
> also a lot of value making it available to customers (or at least a broader
> range of staff/partners), so we would build those in a customer-facing
> system, not LSMB.
>
Right. Two thoughts here is that a full booking module may be rather
beyond the scope of what I am likely to want to do on this current project.
I am thinking that (unless there are others who want to jump in and offer
funding to build such a thing), the best option would be to get a rental
module done first and then look at building a booking module on the top of
it down the road.
>
> Cheers,
> John Locke
> http://www.freelock.com
>
>
>
> On 02/25/2014 03:13 AM, Pongrácz István wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> This seems a good one :)
>
> As I can see, this is similar or could be used for recurring services,
> like rent a virtual machine (monthly), a domain (yearly or two years),
> workstation (monthly) etc.
>
> Example real life scenario could be handy to see.
>
> One example:
>
> - rent a service, monthly fee, not for fixed period -> like renting a
> virtual machine or a hosted ledgersmb, without time limit -> it ends when
> the customer cancel his subscription, for example 30 days before,
> - rent a car for a year, monthly fee, fixed 1 year period
> - house cleaning until cancellation (similar to the first one) -
> monthly
> - accounting service - monthly
> - rent a smartphone :)
>
> Are these examples suitable for the idea?
>
> Of course, some of the situation there are fixed assets units (computer,
> phone, car, building, whatever), in other cases not.
>
> Cheers,
>
> István
>
>
>
> ----------------eredeti üzenet-----------------
> Feladó: "Chris Travers" <chris.trav...@gmail.com><chris.trav...@gmail.com>
> Címzett: "Development discussion for LedgerSMB"
> <ledger-smb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net><ledger-smb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
> Dátum: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 02:47:28 -0800
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am beginning work on an add-on for 1.4 regarding tracking rental
> equipment, etc. I wanted to toss my ideas in here for feedback.
>
> MODELLING
>
> I think the best way to model this would be to track rentals against fixed
> assets. I.e. you rent out a fixed asset, and this should allow you to do
> more fine-grained profit/loss reporting on individual rentals than
> otherwise possible.
>
> So my thinking is that you would have:
>
> Fixed assets -> multiple "rental slots" (i.e. "units" available for
> rental). For example, a building might be available to be rented for x
> events, but a piece of construction equipment might be available to be
> rented only once at a time.
>
> Rental slot -> Service. Each rental slot would be associated any number of
> services. This could be changed over time to include more services, but
> for now I only expect to support a 1:1 mapping in the front-end
>
> Rental slot -> Usage Contract. Each rental slot can be associated with
> any number of usage contracts, but only one at a time.
>
> Usage contract - Service. The contract would contain all the information
> needed to fill out a line in the invoice and ar tables. A contract would be
> assumed to match to one line in orderitems or invoices.
>
> WORKFLOW
>
> 1. Adding Rental Slots:
> a. Rentals/Manage Slots
> b. Enter asset tag, continue
> c. Add slots as needed (number, label, services) and save
> d. Slots can be retired here as well (basically an end date would be
> added).
>
> 2. Renting Unit.
> a. Rentals/Rent
> b. Search for customer, enter asset tag, start and end dates
> c. Select available slot
> d. Enter information and save
>
> 3. Return of rental
> a. Rentals/Search
> b. Enter asset tag, date, and/or customer information. Search
> c. Enter date of return, check "Returned" and save.
> d. If desired you can also click "bill," "generate order" or "renew"
> (in which case a new usage contract will be created).
>
> INTERFACES
>
> SQL and Perl Interfaces:
>
> 1. Wrapped in Asset/Rental.pm class:
> asset__list_rental_slots(in_id)
> asset__list_rental_slots_by_tag(in_tag)
>
> 2. Wrapped in Asset/Rental/Slot.pm
> rental_slot__list_services(in_id)
> rental_slot__add(...)
> rental_slot__search(...)
> rental_slot__retire(...)
>
> 3. Wrapped in Asset/Rental/Contract.pm
> rental_contract__add(...)
> rental_contract__renew(...)
> rental_contract__generate_order(...)
> rental_contract__bill(...)
>
> DEPENDENCIES
>
> PostgreSQL 9.2 (needed for range types and exclude constraints)
> PGObject::Simple::Role 1.1 (not out yet, will probably be out tomorrow)
> PGObject::Simple 1.6
> PGObject::Util::DBMethod 1.0
>
> --
> Best Wishes,
> Chris Travers
>
> Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor
> lock-in.
> http://www.efficito.com/learn_more
> ------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Flow-based real-time traffic analytics software. Cisco certified tool.
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> Customize your own dashboards, set traffic alerts and generate reports.
> Network behavioral analysis & security monitoring. All-in-one tool.
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--
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor
lock-in.
http://www.efficito.com/learn_more
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flow-based real-time traffic analytics software. Cisco certified tool.
Monitor traffic, SLAs, QoS, Medianet, WAAS etc. with NetFlow Analyzer
Customize your own dashboards, set traffic alerts and generate reports.
Network behavioral analysis & security monitoring. All-in-one tool.
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=126839071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
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