When a guest departs you need to make sure you click on the reservation to pull up the edit window and change the status from “arrived” to “departed”. When the activity report shows people as “overdue for 8 days”, you most likely need to toggle those reservations status.

Reservation colors show the status of each reservation, so you can quickly scan your calendar and see who’s confirmed, arrived, etc. Here’s a key:

• Reserved  =  Blue
• Confirmed  =  Green
• Arrived  =  Orange
• Departed  =  Grey

For more detail on how to use reservation status and color, there’s an article in our documentation section that goes into greater detail called How To Use Reservation Status and Color.

Each reservation has a “status”, and the color of the reservation bar in the calendar corresponds to the current status of that reservation. A reservation can have a status of only one type at a time, and the choices are reserved, confirmed, arrived, departed and canceled.

The color helps to quickly identify the status of each reservation when scanning the calendar. You can also hover over a reservation to see the status printed in the upper right corner of the hover box. In the Guest section you can view your guest list by status, so you can see everyone who has convirmed, arrived, or canceled at the same time.

Future Status: Reserved and Confirmed

If you leave the default selection when creating a new reservation it will appear in a blue bar representing the status “reserved”. So in most cases, when looking forward over the coming weeks most reservations will appear blue.

If you require guests to confirm, you can click on a reservation and change the status from “reserved” to “confirmed”. This will change the color of the reservation to green.

Current Activity: Arrived and Departed

Setting the status to Arrived changes the color to orange and updates the daily activity log. Over the course of the day as guests arrive more and more of the reservations will appear orange, so you can quickly glance at the calendar to see who has arrived and who has not yet arrived.

When a guest departs you can set the status to Departed in the same way. This “greys out” the reservation on the calendar and updates the daily activity log.

Canceled Reservations

Canceled reservations don’t have a color because they don’t appear on the calendar at all. Once you cancel a reservation it comes off the calendar to make room for new reservations, but we don’t forget about it. You can easily view all your canceled reservations by visiting the Guest section and clicking on Canceled in the sub-menu. This is a great report to review if you are concerned about sudden vacancies.

Since we don’t delete cancellations, they will appear whenever a guest makes a new reservation, so you can quickly tell if someone is prone to cancellations or not.

If you’re just managing a handful of resources, you can probably easily see everything at once. But what if you book a lot of stuff, or you book differet kinds of stuff?

You can group resources onto different calendars, so that you can view a few of them at a time, or quickly see groups of them when the phone rings.

To create new calendars, simply click on My Settings in the main navigation and choose Calendars from the sub navigation. Click the “Add New” link next to the page heading and give your calendar a name and click Create. You can repeat this process for each calendar you’d like to create.

Next, you need to assign resources to each calendar. Click on Resources in the main navigation to return to your resources list, and click on the name of any resource to bring up the edit window. On the right side just above the Update button you’ll see a list of your calendars. You can check the box next to each calendar you want this resource to appear on.

Separating Resource Types

Once you experiment with creating a few calendars, you’ll probably get a feel for their most effective use for your organization. But I’m going to provide a few examples here, to get you in the right frame of thinking.

The first and most obvious use for multiple calendars is to separate different types of resources. A resort might take reservations for hotel rooms, cabins, dock slips and dormitories for overflow space. In ResEngine each of these resource types could have it’s own calendar, so when a call comes in for a dock slip reservation, a single click can display availability for only dock slips. Likewise for the other types of properties.

Location-based Calendars

Similar to the above example, location-based calendars separate resources based on geographic location. This works well if you manage three equipment rental stores, or take reservations for airplanes at multiple airports. If resources move between locations they can be easily updated to reflect their current location.

Feature-based Calendars

Because resources can be assigned to multiple calendars, you can use them as “tags” to group resources in different ways based on their characteristics.

If you take reservations for hotel rooms, you might group them in different ways on the following calendars: Singles, Doubles, Ocean View, Pool View, Handicap Accessible. One room might be assigned to any number of these calendars based on its characteristics.

ResEngine provides pop-up “date pickers” and “time pickers” beside fields that require this information, and they’re much faster than trying to type out dates on the keyboard. But what if the phones are ringing off the hook and you want to go faster? Or if your organization takes reservations for certain time periods that become repetitive?

For these kinds of situations ResEngine is usually smart enough to figure out the date or time you want, even if you just type a single word.

For instance, try creating a new reservation and when you get to the start field, just type in “today” and for the end field, type in “tomorrow”. Click the next button and take a look at the start and end times recorded on the left. ResEngine is smart enough to figure out what you meant by “today” and “tomorrow”!

Let’s try another one that is perhaps more useful. Try making a reservation that starts “tomorrow” and ends “next friday”. Just type “tomorrow” into the start field and “next friday” into the end field. ResEngine should get that one right too (of course, the specifics of the stay will depend on when you’re trying this).

Here are a few other ways you can enter reservations:

• starts “in 3 days” and ends “in 6 days”
• starts “friday” and ends “sunday”
• starts “jun 13″ and ends “jun 16″
• starts “july 4th” and ends “july 8th”

If you don’t specify times, ResEngine will guess those (since you probably don’t really use them). But if you do want to enter times, you can do the same sort of thing:

• starts “today at 3pm” and ends “tomorrow at 11:30am”
• starts “friday at 4pm” and ends “sunday at 2pm”
• starts “mar 5 at 9:30am” and ends “mar 12 at 10:15am”

Don’t be afraid to experiment with these. A great way to experiment without making reservations is to use the field at the top right of the calendar. This field lets you set the “range” of the calendar display, and whatever you type into the field will become the first row on the left side. This field, like the start and stop fields, is smart enough to figure out the date from whatever you type.

It depends. ResEngine is great for reserving anything that people book on an hourly, nightly or weekly basis. Our 7 day view is great for hotels, campgrounds, and youth hostels. It’s also good for renting things on a daily basis, like boats, airplanes or bicycles.

If you rent things on a weekly basis ResEngine you can use our 7 day or 30 day views. We have users that take reservations for vacation rentals and other weekly scenarios. Weekly operations tend to look a bit further forward on the calendar, so the 30 day view is essential.

If you take reservations on a monthly or yearly basis, you probably don’t want to use ResEngine (yet!). We’re working on additional, longer views that will help manage these reservations more efficiently.

Yes. ResEngine features two levels of access, your account administrator and a regular user. When you set up a new ResEngine trial, the account you are creating first is your administrator account. Admins manage the billing information for your account and set up and manage all of your Resources.

Regular users log in and manage reservation and guests on a day-to-day basis. You can have as many regular users as you like (check your plan details for pricing restrictions).

No, ResEngine is designed to be an internal tool for you and your team to manage your property. We don’t make your reservations for you, or charge you to make reservations, or anything like that. ResEngine enables you to manage your own reservations faster and easier.

ResEngine is a web-based reservation and resource tracking application designed to be simple and quick to use. It features a 7 day calendar view as well as activity lists by day. It maintains a database of those making reservations (”guests”), so returning guests are easily managed. You can also create multiple calendars so you can manage different property types or filter properties by different features.

For more information including a 6 minute introductory screencast, visit http://ResEngine.com

When ResEngine shows your reservation on a daily calendar, it starts on the day the guest arrives and continues across all the days of the reservation and ends on the day before they depart. This way you can see that the resource is available again for the evening of the departure date, and another reservation can begin on the departure day without looking like a double booking. You can see the specific start and stop dates and times by hovering over the reservation and viewing the details pop-up.

When you use the single day view, this is not the case. Because we’re displaying hourly increments (actually 15 minute increments if you count the lines!) we show the exact start and stop times.