Booking Studios and Rooms in TBS

Booking rooms on short term bases requires an element of flexibility in how those bookings are created, and how they are displayed

This article shows you some of the options currently built in to the TBS browser interface.......

Within the standard stock description entry (which should be used for creating each individual 'space' to be booked out) there is a specific field available to designate that entry as a 'studio' type entry:

The significance of adding the 'S' to that field is that it designates a studio booking which should be added as a separate entry for each 'day' of the overall booking (i.e. where you want the flexibility of varying hours for each day, and/or adding extras to the daily individual total.....

Note : when setting up an hourly based description entry, if you add a default rate set as 'hourly' then the respective bookings entries are added calculated based upon the start to end times for that day, which makes the charging side of the booking easy to flex without having to do any manual recalculation of hourly rates

The alternative booking option is that, if a booking is made from Monday to Thursday, TBS will consider it a 24 hour a day lockout from the start time through until the end time and as one contiguous charging element. This is an important differential to understand when approaching studio/room booking within TBS !

For creating the 'daily' entry style, this *only* takes effect for a booking created using the 'Quick Booking' option within the browser app :

And this opens the quick booking screen :

Here you can quickly fill in the entirety of information for a booking in one screen and then create it - in the top section lookup your clients details - in the middle, look up your studio or room description - and in the lower section set your dates for the booking - here set the 'date to pickup' and 'hire start' to your starting day - and optionally the pickup time to the start time of your daily requirement, and set the 'hire end' according to your normal TBS booking rules for chargeable dates to cover the period required, and set the 'return date' and time to the end of your requirement - so for example a studio required from Wednesday 10am to Thursday at 6pm, depending upon your charging rules, would have its 'hire end' date as either the Thursday or the Friday, but a 'return date' and time of Thursday at 6pm - if you chose a stock description designated with the 'S' studio designation, then for a multi day booking, this would create separate blocks of time for each day of your designated period between the start time and the end time, or in this example Wednesday 10am to 6pm, and Thursday 10am to 6pm :

You can create a personalised list of your studios/rooms for quick calendar viewing by setting up a 'Refs' list as follows :

With the individual entries as such - note the 'Integer' value is the primary key value of the stock description itself and the Display Text value can be set to whatever you choose :

Note: you can see the primary key value by hovering the mouse over any link of the stock description :

Once you have a list of rooms you wish to view in a calendar, you can add a custom menu option to view these by going to the Admin menu and selecting User Menu Options :

This shows a list of entries you have set up for your own use which will show in the User Options menu when you are logged in :

The entry itself simply shows the call that you would like to be made from that option entry - adjust the first part of the url to the one for your company's setup :

Choose this option from your User Options menu to display the default Studio calendar screen :

Note : there are several different views available for the calendar, this one is to show 3 days 'side by side' :

This one shows a week in a horizontal mode (typically better if you have many rooms) :

In this view you can see a whole month in a more typical calendar style (bad for many rooms !) :

Finally, this one shows a month in a horizontal mode (typically better if you have many rooms) :

From within any of these windows (and you can design any other variant of these that you may prefer) you can drag any booking entry either around by time - here we dragged the Wednesday booking up by an hour :

which updated the booking entry automatically for us :

Alternatively we can drag a booking sideways if we wish to swap that booking to a different room - here we dragged the Thursday booking from Studio 3 over to Studio 2 :

which updated the booking entry automatically for us :