Introduction
Confirming is the moment a booking stops being a private note in your system and becomes something the customer holds in writing. You do it on the booking's own screen, the one with the booking number at the top. Pressing Confirm does three things at once: it moves the booking to Confirmed, produces the rental agreement, and emails the customer a copy.
Beside it sits a softer version. Provisional holds the booking without selling it: the customer gets a reservation request rather than a confirmation, and the booking sits at Unconfirmed until someone presses Confirm properly.
You would be here because:
- A customer on the phone has agreed the dates and the price, and wants it in writing before they come in.
- A company wants a van held for next month but their manager has not signed off yet, so you want to hold it without treating it as sold.
- You moved the dates or swapped the vehicle after confirming, and the agreement the customer is holding is now out of date.
- The customer says the confirmation email never arrived.
- You are working through the bookings your colleagues left as drafts yesterday.
Words this screen uses
| The screen says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unconfirmed | Provisionally confirmed: held for the customer, not sold |
| Draft on a booking | A booking nobody has confirmed yet, still on its ten-minute clock |
| Draft on an agreement | An agreement that is not the final signed copy. A Confirmed booking can carry a Draft agreement, and that is normal |
| The vehicle (the app calls it the asset) | The car or van attached to this booking |
Every way a booking gets confirmed
| Route | What the customer gets | Covered here |
|---|---|---|
| Confirm on the booking screen | Status Confirmed, a draft rental agreement, and a confirmation email | Yes |
| Provisional on the booking screen | Status Unconfirmed, a draft rental agreement, and a reservation-request email | Yes |
| Reconfirm new data | A fresh draft agreement and another confirmation email | Yes |
| Resend confirmation email | The same confirmation email again, nothing else | Yes |
| The customer accepts a quote online | The quote is marked accepted and the booking jumps straight to Confirmed, agreement and email included, with nobody at the desk pressing anything | No, the quote screens do this themselves |
Use this page for the four routes that start with a button on the booking screen.
How to use
Configuration
Two company-wide settings change what confirming does. Both live on the same screen and both are limited to a company administrator.
From the main menu open Settings, then click Operational.
- Find Manual booking confirm email. It is a pair of radio buttons, and every company starts on No.
- Find Advanced payment configuration lower down the same screen. It is a switch and it starts off.
- Press Save when you are done.
| Setting | Starts as | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Manual booking confirm email | No | No sends the confirmation email on its own. Yes opens an email window first, so you can read and edit the message before it goes |
| Advanced payment configuration | Off | Off sends the same confirmation email to everyone. On lets the app pick a different confirmation email depending on how far away the pick-up is |
Turning either one on changes nothing about bookings you have already confirmed. It only affects the next confirmation.
Setting the payment thresholds. Next to Advanced payment configuration sits a Setup button with a cog icon. Pressing it saves the switch and opens a screen of thresholds. Skim the table below once, then fill in the fields it describes and press Save; you will come back to particular rows as they come up:
| Field | Starts as | What it does | What it accepts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advance payment | Off | Turns on the advance-payment version of the confirmation email | A yes/no switch |
| Advance payment threshold | 28 | Pick-ups further away than this many days get that email | Whole days only |
| Advance payment type | Percentage | Whether you ask for a share of the total or a fixed sum. Greyed out until Advance payment is on | Percentage or Amount |
| Advance payment percentage | 20 | The share you ask for up front. Greyed out unless the type is Percentage | Decimals allowed |
| Advance payment amount | 400 | The fixed sum you ask for up front. Greyed out unless the type is Amount | Decimals allowed |
| Full payment | Off | Turns on the pay-in-full-with-deposit version of the confirmation email | A yes/no switch |
| Full payment threshold | 4 | Pick-ups closer than this many days get that email | Whole days only |
Writing the emails themselves. The app does not invent the wording. Each kind of message is a template your company keeps, one per language. If no active template matches, confirming still changes the booking's status, but no email leaves the building and you see No email template available. Please create a template first. Templates are kept under the email area of the main menu, on its Bookings list.
Before you start: you need a full staff account to confirm a booking. Only a company administrator can open Settings, so ask whoever administers your company to change either setting above. The booking itself must already have a customer attached, and that customer needs a name filled in on their invoice details, must not be blocked and must not be on your blacklist. Confirming stops on any of these and tells you which.
Using the confirm buttons
Open the booking first. From the main menu open Bookings and click the booking's row. You can also click a booking's block on the Scheduler, or open one from the pick-up and drop-off lists on your daily overview. All three land on the same screen.
- Check a customer is attached, in the customer area near the top. Confirming is the point where the app stops you if there is none.
- Add a contact person, if this is a company hire. Press Add near the customer details, then Update on somebody's row to attach them, New to create a new person against that company, or Existing account to link somebody who already has a login. The list closes as soon as you press Update.
- Press Confirm. The booking moves to Confirmed, a draft rental agreement is produced, and the confirmation email goes out.
- Or press Provisional, if you are only holding the vehicle. The booking moves to Unconfirmed, the same draft agreement is produced, and the customer gets a reservation request instead.
- Check the status at the top of the booking has changed and the agreement has appeared in the booking's documents area. Press Logs in the top bar for what was recorded, and click a row to open its detail.
When the confirmation is sent by hand. If your company has Manual booking confirm email set to Yes, step 3 changes: the booking is confirmed and the agreement produced exactly as before, but an email window opens for you to check and send rather than the message going out silently.
Reconfirming after a change. Once a booking is Confirmed, or the vehicle has been picked up, a Reconfirm new data button appears in the top bar. It asks This will regenerate a new draft agreement. Are you sure? Press Proceed and the confirmation runs again against the booking's current dates, vehicle and price. Use it whenever you have changed something the customer's copy no longer reflects.
Sending the same email again. On a Confirmed booking there is also Resend confirmation email. It only re-sends: no new agreement, no status change. Reach for this one when the customer has simply lost the message.
Key details
Confirming deletes every signature already on the booking. Both the customer's signature and your colleague's are wiped, every time, on Confirm, on Provisional and on Reconfirm new data. If a customer signed at the counter this morning and you reconfirm this afternoon, that signature is gone and they have to sign again. This is the most expensive thing on this page to get wrong: reconfirm before you collect the signature, never after.
Who receives what. The confirmation email goes to the main renter, at the address on their customer record. Every extra driver on the booking who has both an email address and a name on file gets a separate driver message of their own; the main renter is left out of that one so they do not get two emails. The contact person you attached in step 2 is recorded against the booking and shown on screen, but no email is addressed to them today.
Which confirmation email goes out. With Advanced payment configuration off there is only one. With it on, the app counts the days between now and the contract pick-up and compares that against the two thresholds.
| Pick-up is | Which email goes out |
|---|---|
| More than 28 days away | The advance-payment email, if Advance payment is on |
| Fewer than 4 days away | The pay-in-full-with-deposit email, if Full payment is on |
| Anything else, including exactly 28 or exactly 4 days away | The ordinary confirmation email |
Worked through on a €900 hire, confirmed on 1 September, with the standard thresholds and both switches on: a 20 October pick-up is 49 days out, which is more than 28, so the customer gets the advance-payment email asking 20% of €900, or €180. Move that pick-up to 29 September and it is exactly 28 days out, not more than 28, so they get the ordinary confirmation and no figure is asked for up front. Move it to 3 September and it is 2 days out, fewer than 4, so they get the pay-in-full-with-deposit email for the whole €900. At exactly 4 days out, on 5 September, they are back to the ordinary confirmation. Only that ordinary email is ever swapped; a provisional booking's reservation request is not.
Which language the customer is written to in. The app looks for a template in the customer's own language, then your company's, then that of whoever is signed in.
The agreement produced by confirming is a draft. That is expected and it is not a problem. When you need the final official version, use Renew agreement in the top bar, which asks Are you sure? This will create a new official agreement.
What to do next: hand the vehicle over when the customer arrives, which is covered in Run the pickup inspection. If the dates or the vehicle change before then, make the change first and press Reconfirm new data afterwards, so the customer's copy matches.
Q&A
I reconfirmed a booking and the customer's signature has vanished. Can I get it back? No. Every confirmation clears the signatures held against the booking, and there is no undo. The customer has to sign again, either at the counter during the pick-up inspection or remotely using Sign document remote in the booking's top bar.
Why does Confirm refuse and say the customer is blocked or blacklisted? Confirming runs four checks on the customer and stops at the first one that fails, each with its own message. Please select a customer first. means no customer is attached at all. Please add a customer first! means one is attached but has no name on their invoice details. Customer is blocked. and Can't confirm. Customer on blacklist. both mean somebody has deliberately barred this customer. Fix the first two in the booking's customer area. For the last two the block was put there on purpose, so take it up with whoever manages your customer records before you confirm.
The booking says Confirmed but the customer never got an email. What now? The status change and the email are two separate steps, and the status is saved first, so a confirmed booking with no email means the email step failed on its own. Check three things in this order. There may be no active template for your company in any of the languages the app tries, in which case you would have seen No email template available. Please create a template first. — ask your administrator to add one under the email area's Bookings list. The customer may have unsubscribed from this kind of message, which stops it silently; ask your administrator to check their record. Or it may still be on its way, because an automatic confirmation is queued and retried rather than sent on the spot. Press Logs on the booking to see what has been recorded so far, then use Resend confirmation email to send it again.
I confirmed by hand and got a message about generating documents. With Manual booking confirm email set to Yes you may see An error happened while generating the related documents. Please try again later. The screen closes and the booking is put back to the status it had before, so nothing is left half-done. Reopen the booking and press Confirm again.
Why is there no Reconfirm new data button on this booking? It only appears once a booking is Confirmed, or the vehicle has been picked up. On a Draft or Unconfirmed booking you press Confirm instead, which is the same action under its first-time name. Resend confirmation email is narrower still and appears only on a Confirmed booking.
Does a provisional booking hold the vehicle the same way a confirmed one does? Yes, but the customer's paperwork says something different. The vehicle stays attached and the booking occupies the same slot on the Scheduler. What changes is the message: an Unconfirmed booking sends a reservation request, and the payment-threshold rules above do not apply to it. Press Confirm when the customer commits.
Can I confirm a booking whose ten-minute draft clock has run out? Not directly. A booking that timed out has to be brought back with Activate first, which asks Are you sure? — see Create a booking for what that button does and which bookings it appears on. Once the booking is live again you can confirm it normally.
Why did a booking confirm itself when nobody here touched it? A quote the customer accepts online marks itself accepted and confirms the booking in the same step, agreement and email included. Press Logs on the booking to see when that happened.
Related pages: Create a booking for everything that happens before this point, including the ten-minute draft clock and how a customer gets attached, and Run the pickup inspection for collecting the signature that confirming clears.