Bookings and availability

Taking a booking

You need a customer, a date out, a date back and at least one line. Everything else can wait. If the customer is new you can add them, their venue and the person to ask for without leaving the form — walking away to create a customer loses every line already on the booking.

The kind of event is your own list, maintained under Bookings. Its first option is Not said, because “they did not say on the phone” is a real answer and better than guessing.

The venue

The venue is where the job happens, and it belongs to the customer rather than to this one booking — so next August you can find that place you went to. The same is true of the contact: the person you ring when you arrive is a fact about the customer, not about a date.

What availability actually checks

As you add lines, Event Managr checks the whole date range against every other booking holding that item, and warns the moment a day in the middle is short. It is not a single number per item — stock is free for a window, and a tally with one figure cannot answer a question about a range.

Availability answers the same question the other way round: give it two dates and it tells you what you can promise.

Promising more than you own, on purpose

Sometimes you know the linens come back Saturday night and go out again Sunday morning, and the app cannot know that. So the warning can be overridden — but the booking is flagged as overbooked from then on, and it shows up on the dashboard and on Conflicts. Nobody has to remember it, which is the point.

Moving a booking along

Tentative, confirmed, out, returned — and cancelled, from either of the first two. A booking cannot skip a step or go backwards; see the status reference for the exact moves. Marking stock out and counting it back in have their own screens, covered in loading and returns.