The conference module allow you to have conference rooms that can be booked hourly, half day or full day. You can create reservations with several types of rooms e.g. both conference rooms, hotel rooms and inventory services (inventory services can be used for keeping track of activities, parking spaces etc.).
The conference rooms support seating options, and number of guests allowed in the room depend on the seating selected.
Workflows can be added to keeping track of the status of the reservation (example flow: proposal is sent, proposal confirmed, prepayment made, planning done, invoice sent, invoice paid).
Proposals can either be sent directly from Nitesoft or you can have an integration to getAccept where they will send the proposal and customer can digitaly sign it using bankId.
If you have different departments working with preparing different parts of the conference it may be helpful to use comment areas. Comment Areas is a way to control which comments that should be visible for each department.
It is possible to add booking of conference rooms to the online booking.
Setup of conference module
To activate conference module you should setup the following items:
Add conference rooms -The conference module needs to be activted in order for you to be able to add Confrence rooms/Activity rooms to Nitesoft.
Add Seating options -(optional) iIf you want support different ways to rearrange the chairs and tables of a conference room.
Pricing and packaging of conference -(optional) If you don't setup any pricing rule the conference rooms will be priced hourly and extras and services can be added individually to the reservation.
Add Workflows -(optional) Workflows are additional statuses added to reservations.
Add Comment Areas -(optional) Should be used if you want comments to be visible to specific user groups.
Add Tags -(optional) You can add additonal options linked to extras or to event schedule. It can for example be used to keep track of in which venue an activity will be held.
Conference online booking -(optional) If you want to allow guests to book conference rooms on your website.
Extras types - This allows you to filter on specific extras in reports and lists. Decide which extras types you will use and go through your existing extras and make sure they have the correct type.
Add guest messages mail templates -For example you might want to send a Conference proposal and Conference confirmation from Nitesoft
Flow for conference booking
Create a conference booking
To see availabilty during the conference dates before you create the reservation you may have use for the 'Free count footer' in Grid.
Create a conference booking make it Preliminary.
To view prices in the reservation exluding VAT use Switch between including and excluding VAT function and to communicate with customer excluding VAT use the Price excluding VAT in receipts and invoices function.
To update the price of many units at the same time you can use the Set rates of serveral rooms function.
Send a proposal to the customer, this can be done either by a guest message in Nitesoft or through getAccept integration.
Before the conference
When proposal is accepted make the reservation confirmed and send an Advance invoice to customer.
Before the conference add details to planning. Most common is to use the extras times and comment fields for the planning and to add an Event Schedule. But you can also use the different functions you enabled during setup, for example: packages, comment areas and tags. When working with times and comments (for example allergies) it can be efficient to use Product Mangement.
During the conference
During the stay keep track different activities using the Planning lists.
There are 2 different planning lists available for the conferences:
Planning lists>Products -In this list you see products listed by time, this list is primarily used as breakfast list or kitchen list. But you can filter on each extras type, e.g. housekeeping and conference.
Planning lists>Activities -In this list you can see activities and products listed by time or grouped be reservation, this list is primarily used to see activity list for conference reservations.
You check in an out the conference rooms from Conference check in/out and hotel rooms from the usual Arrival list.
After the conference is over send the final invoice.
To keep track of the different stages in the process you can use Workflows, so you add additional statuses for example: proposal sent, advance invoice sent, planning not done, planning ready, send final invoice.
Useful Reports
These report can be useful when working with conferences:
Reveneue Overview -Shows how revenues and occupancy is divided over different types of reservations, for example on rooms or conference rooms, different target groups and housing, food and beverage and other.
Reservations Details -Show ADR, occupancy and length of stay/pick up based on stay dates and booking dates, you can group by channel, target group, rate type or unit and compare to past time period.
Extra Report -Show number of sold extras and corresponding amounts in selected Stay dates. It's possible to search for all extras of a specific 'Type'.