Hi, Chris,
On 02/25/2014 05:47 PM, Chris Travers wrote:
On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 8:32 AM, John Locke <m...@freelock.com
<mailto: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.
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.
By "Services" are you referring to services under Parts & Services?
I think a service can certainly be used for pricing -- e.g. "Lawnmower
Rental, hourly", "Lawnmower Rental, daily", with qty fields working as
needed.
But it does not capture the time period of the booking -- or else you
would need to create a new service for every rental...
You still need something representing a time slot, to know whether
something you want to rent is available or not. In my modeling, I've
used "Slots" to define the available time periods, and then a "booking"
can occupy 1 or more slots and associated rental objects.
You essentially need to create a slot for every possible time period you
want to make available for booking, for as far out as you want to allow
scheduling. And then create new slots with a scheduled job (or on demand
when you get a booking further out than you have defined slots). At
least that's how I've handled creating an availability matrix.
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.
Well, I would tend to think that you would track the bookings and slots
in the rental module, and use a sales order to track the service rate
(along with some link to the corresponding booking in the rental module
-- serial number?)
In my use case, I would handle the booking and slots in a completely
external system, for managing availability, and then just generate a
sales order with the appropriate services to capture payment details,
and turn into an invoice for the actual charge.
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.
I guess my question here would be what use cases does the "rental
module" have, if you're not going to build booking functionality? E.g.
for your "Renting Unit" workflow, how are you going to determine what
rentals are available, if you aren't tracking time slots and bookings?
Is this more of a library model, a simple check-in/check-out system?
By all means, if you have a customer asking for this, I completely
understand putting time into it. But if not, I would really like to see
the precursors that are coming up in this thread dialed in before
expanding the scope of the system:
1. Deposit/pre-payment management
2. Asset management covering purchase, depreciation, and disposal of
rental equipment (I'm sure this can be done now, but I don't know how...)
3. Options/product modifiers
Actually charging for rentals seems pretty straightforward without an
add-on!
Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com
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