Introduction
A booking holds one hire: the dates, the vehicle class, the branches the vehicle leaves from and comes back to, the price, and the customer. Nearly every booking starts on the screen headed New Booking, where you search for a free vehicle class and press Select. The booking then opens on its own screen, its booking number at the top.
What you get is neither finished nor permanently yours. It arrives as a Draft, with a price, a deposit and standard extras on it, often with one specific vehicle attached, and on a ten-minute clock. Attaching the customer and confirming is what makes it real.
You would be here because:
- a customer on the phone wants a van for three days next week;
- a regular customer wants the same hire again next month;
- a company wants the same vehicle every Friday for a month;
- a booking you started earlier ran out of time while you looked the customer up.
Words this screen uses
| The screen says | It means |
|---|---|
| Asset group | A vehicle class — what a customer books, not one van |
| Draft | Held for you, not a reservation, about to expire |
| Unconfirmed | A real booking, no agreement sent yet |
| TimedOut | A draft that ran out of time |
| To be scheduled | The list of bookings with no vehicle yet |
Every way to create a booking
The routes differ in what the app checks and fills in, and the finished booking never says which one made it. Skim the table, then come back to rows as they come up:
| Route | What you get | Covered |
|---|---|---|
| New Booking, then Select on a row | Availability checked, price and extras filled in, often a vehicle picked for you, ten-minute hold | This page |
| New Booking, then Quote on a row | An offer valid for seven days | Not here — an offer, not a reservation |
| The copy icon on a bookings list row | A duplicate on the same dates, Unconfirmed | This page |
| Recurring planner (Beta) on a booking | A run of copies at a fixed interval | This page |
| Dragging on empty space on the Scheduler | A draft on that exact vehicle and row | The Scheduler |
| New booking inside an open rental | An empty booking: no dates, no class, no checks | This page — read the warning |
| The second New in the bookings menu | A hire of a month or more | Not here — minimum thirty days |
| Converting a request for proposal | A booking at Quote, customer attached, no vehicle | Not here — an offer, not a reservation |
Use the New Booking route for anything a customer is paying for. Every other route skips the availability check.
How to use
Configuration
Two administrator settings decide what the app does the moment you press Select. Both are set once and apply to your whole company.
Whether a vehicle is picked for you. From the main menu open Settings, then click Operational. Scroll to Auto assign assets, pick one of three values, and press Save.
| Auto assign assets | What happens on Select |
|---|---|
| Random (the value every company starts with) | One free vehicle in the class is picked at random and attached |
| LastBooked | The free vehicle that came back most recently before your pick-up time is attached |
| None | No vehicle is attached; the booking goes onto To be scheduled for someone to assign later |
This is not retroactive. Changing it does nothing to bookings that already exist — it only changes what happens the next time somebody presses Select.
Which extras get added on their own. From the main menu open Product design, then Asset groups, then open a vehicle class with the pencil icon on its row. Two buttons there control what a new booking starts with:
| Button | Screen you land on | What the columns do |
|---|---|---|
| Link other options | Link optional options | isSelected offers the extra; isCharged adds it to every new booking automatically |
| Link insurance options | Link insurance options | is selected offers the insurance; isCharged adds it to every new booking automatically |
Both screens save a tick the instant you make it. The Save and Cancel buttons at the bottom only close the screen — Cancel does not put a tick back.
Before you start: you need a full staff account to create a booking at all; every button in this task is closed to anyone without one. The two settings above are narrower still — only a company administrator can open Operational or change what a vehicle class charges for. You also need a default price list in place, or every price on the new booking comes back as zero, and at least one vehicle class set up at both the branch you collect from and the branch you return to.
Using the New Booking screen
New Booking has its own place in the main menu. You can also reach it by opening Bookings in the main menu and choosing New, or from the New Booking button on your daily overview and at the top of the bookings list.
- Set the dates, the two branches and the category, then press Search. Reading the results is a job of its own — see Search for an available vehicle.
- Press Select on the row for the class you want. The booking is created and opens straight away. A class with nothing free still lets you through, after Warning, no availability for this booking. Feel free to overbook, but proceed with caution.
- Attach the customer, at the top of the booking screen, before anything else. The clock is running, and confirming without one gives Please select a customer first., or Please add a customer first! if the customer you picked has no invoice name.
- Check which vehicle you were given. One may already be attached, chosen for you — never promise a colour or registration without looking.
- Check the extras. Everything marked isCharged on that vehicle class is already on the booking, priced for the whole period, and the deposit has been set from the insurance among them.
- Confirm the booking. This ends the clock and turns the draft into a reservation you can send an agreement for.
Copy an existing booking when a customer wants the same hire again. Open Bookings in the main menu, find the booking, and click the copy icon among the icons on its row. It asks Are you sure?; press Proceed and the copy opens with Booking copied. Please make sure to adjust the dates. Important: functionality still in development. Not all items copied. Take that at its word — change the dates, then check the booking through before confirming it.
Create a run of repeating bookings from an open booking. Click Recurring planner (Beta) for the Schedule recurring bookings screen:
- Set Every to the gap in days between one booking and the next, and Amount of bookings to how many copies you want. They start at 7 and 4, whole numbers only.
- Choose Booking status — Confirmed or Unconfirmed. It starts on Confirmed.
- Press Populate. A list appears with a Checkout and a Checkin date per row. Nothing has been created yet; this is a preview.
- Adjust a row's dates by typing in them, or remove a row with the bin icon at its end.
- Press Save. You get The bookings has been created successfully. and the screen closes. Cancel and Back close it, creating nothing.
Key details
What the app fills in when you press Select. The dates and branches come from your search, the rental charge from your standard price list. The deposit starts from the vehicle class, then gets replaced by the deposit on whichever insurance was added — or by the customer's own agreed deposit, if they have one.
The ten-minute clock, and what stops it. A booking made from New Booking or by dragging on the Scheduler expires ten minutes after it was created, and the clock is only checked when somebody presses Search. A draft created at 14:00 expires at 14:10: a search at 14:09 leaves it, a search at 14:11 turns it into TimedOut. Confirming takes it off the clock, and only a Draft is ever swept, so a copy or a recurring booking never expires.
Bringing a timed-out booking back. Open it and press Activate, which asks Are you sure?, then makes it Unconfirmed and recalculates the price. It appears only on a TimedOut or Cancelled booking.
What a copy carries and what it does not. A copy keeps the customer, the dates, the vehicle class, the same specific vehicle, both branches, the rental charge and every extra, and arrives as Unconfirmed. It does not carry notes, references, extra drivers, documents, or fuel and damage records. Copy a three-day van hire on 3–6 October at €135,00 and you get a second one on 3–6 October, same van, €135,00, double-booked until you move its dates.
What the recurring planner carries. Every copy keeps the customer, the vehicle class, the same specific vehicle, both branches and the full price, and takes its status from Booking status. With 7 and 4 in the two boxes, a booking running Friday 3 October to Monday 6 October produces four more, on 10, 17, 24 and 31 October. No availability check runs at any point.
What to do next: attach the customer, then confirm — the draft is on a clock, and a booking without a customer cannot be confirmed. If the vehicle you were given is wrong, change it before you confirm, not after.
Q&A
A booking I created a few minutes ago is now marked TimedOut. Ten minutes passed, and the next search anybody in your company ran swept it up — the sweep is company-wide, so a colleague's search can be what expires your draft, and yours can expire theirs. Nothing is deleted. Find the booking in Bookings in the main menu, open it, and press Activate to bring it back as Unconfirmed.
The copy I made is double-booking the vehicle. A copy keeps the original's dates and the original's specific vehicle, and no availability check runs when it is made. Open the copy, change its dates, and check the vehicle is still the right one — the app will not warn you about the clash.
The recurring bookings I created are all on the same vehicle. That is what the planner copies. If you need different vehicles across the run, open each booking afterwards and change its vehicle there.
I pressed Populate again and lost my edits to the dates. Populate throws the whole previewed list away and rebuilds it from the original booking every time. Set Every, Amount of bookings and Booking status first, press Populate once, and only then adjust the individual Checkout and Checkin dates.
Nothing happens when I press Populate. Both Every and Amount of bookings have to be filled in and above zero. Empty or zero in either box stops the run silently.
A new booking has no vehicle on it at all. Either your company has Auto assign assets set to None, or nothing in that class was free for those dates. Both are normal. The booking is waiting on To be scheduled in the bookings menu, which lists every booking at your branches with no vehicle attached, leaving out quotes, cancellations, timed-out drafts, no-shows and anything already returned. Assign a vehicle there or on the Scheduler before the pick-up day.
A booking created inside a rental has no dates and no price. The New booking button inside an open rental creates a completely empty booking: no dates, no vehicle class, no branches, no availability check, no extras and no expiry. It is for adding a second vehicle to a hire you are already building, not for taking a booking from a customer. Use New Booking for that.
The bookings menu has two entries called New. They lead to different screens. The first is the ordinary New Booking search; the second is for hires of a month or more, which run on a different contract and are refused below thirty days with Shortlease bookings need to be at least 30 days. Check which screen you landed on before you start typing dates.
An extra I expect on every booking is not being added. Check the vehicle class: Product design, then Asset groups, then the class, then Link other options or Link insurance options. An extra ticked under isSelected but not under isCharged is offered, never added on its own. If both are ticked and it still does not appear, the extra has a minimum or maximum hire length set against it, and your booking falls outside that range. A winter-tyre charge limited to hires of seven days or more will not appear on a three-day booking, and nothing says why.
I cannot open Operational to change the auto-assign setting. That screen is limited to company administrators. Ask whoever administers your company — it is under Settings, then Operational, and the field is Auto assign assets.
Related pages: Search for an available vehicle for reading the availability figures before you press Select, and Reschedule bookings on the Scheduler for creating and moving bookings by dragging on the fleet calendar.