ResEngine

Create Your Resources, The Things You Take Reservations For

Once you create an account at ResEngine.com you’ll find yourself on your default calendar. It will be displaying three sample resources and one sample reservation.

A Resources is a general name for the person, place or thing you take reservations for. If you’re a hotel, a resource would be the same thing as a room. If you book vacation rentals, resources might be houses or condos. If you rent bicycles, a resource would be a bicycle.

There are many fields associated with resources, but to get started quickly you only need to give them names. Click on the word “Resources” in the main menu and you’ll see a listing page showing the three sample resources. You can click on the name of any of these three to edit it to something you’d like it to say. To add another resource, just click the “Add New” link next to the heading. A panel will open up and you can create your next resource.

Keep adding resources in this manner until you’ve got all of them in.

Create Your First Reservation

Now that you have your resources in, take a look at the main ResEngine navigation on the right side of the screen across from the logo. You’ll see four choices: Calendars, Guests, Resources and My Settings.

So far we’ve been working in the Resources section, but now we’re going to move to the area where you’re going to spend most of your time, the Calendars section. click “Calendars” in the main navigation.

The main page is a rolling calendar that shows you what’s going on for the next seven days. Across the top of the calendar you see dates, starting on the left with today’s date and continuing as you move to the right seven days into the future.

Down the left side of the calendar you see the names of your resources. To the right of each resource name are seven empty boxes. This is where you’ll see your reservations, so you can easily figure out when things are reserved and when they are open.

So let’s create your first reservation. Above the calendar you’ll see the page heading Reservations. Click the “Add New” link next to this heading and a panel will open up so you can make a new reservation.

You have to type in a Guest Name, the number of people in the party, and the start and end dates. You can optionally add a phone number and e-mail address if you like. Don’t worry, you can always add these later in the Guests section, as well as additional information like mailing addresses.

So let’s just add a guest name, then click or tab over to the # in party field and type “1″, then click on the small calendar icon to the right of the Start field. A calendar will pop up below the field showing you the current month. You can easily click on any future day in this calendar and it will insert the date into the field for you. Go ahead and click on today’s date. The calendar will close and today’s date will appear in the Start field.

Do the same for the End field, just click on the calendar icon to the right of the End field and select tomorrow’s date.

Click the Next button and the panel will refresh with the information you just entered on the left. On the right you’ll see two drop downs that allow you to select an available resource for this reservation as well as assign it a status.

For now, let’s just accept these default values and click Next.

The page will refresh and you’ll see your new reservation in the top left of the calendar next to your first resource. It will show the last name of the guest and the number in the party. Since it’s next to the name of your first resource, and since it’s displayed under today’s date, you can see that this resource is occupied for tonight.

Your other resources are still free for tonight, and even this resource is free tomorrow, since the guest will be leaving, freeing up the resource for another guest tomorrow night.

Go ahead and add a few more reservations in the same manner, and watch as your calendar fills up.

You may want to “cancel” the sample reservation that was created when you created your account. Just click on it and when the edit screen appears click the “Cancel Reservation” link to the right of the Update button.