Availability Engine Booking Sheet
Purpose
The Availability Booking Sheet is a visual representation of the behaviour of our 'Availability Engine'. This allows interested customers to better visualise how the Availability Engine is suggesting the best fit allocations to optimise your fleet, maximise bookings and save time when managing bookings and allocations.
Whether you run your bookings unallocated, allocated or a mixture of both, our Availability Engine optimises your fleet availability and answers the critical question; do I have a vehicle available?
The Availability Engine Booking Sheet is essentially a way of bringing together the allocated and unallocated bookings and scheduling them optimally against available vehicles in a virtual booking sheet.
More detailed information about the Availability Engine can be found here Availability Engine Overview.
Accessing the Availability Engine Sheet.
There are two ways to access this page. The first is to go Reservations >> Availability Engine Sheet.
You can also access it from the Normal Reservation Sheet. At the top of the page there is a "Switch" button that allows you to go back and forth between the Normal and the Availability Engine booking sheets.
How it Works
Simillarly to the normal Reservation Sheet, the Availability Engine Booking sheet will show all allocated bookings, including non-revenue and maintenance bookings, against their selected vehicle. However, unlike the normal Reservation sheet, it will also display all your Unallocated and On request bookings against a suggested vehicle. This will present you with an optimized 'virtual' view of the complete booking sheet, and allow you to visually see any availability conflict, and under-utillised vehicles.
The different types of bookings will display on the booking sheet as described below.
- Purple - Hired Bookings. These are bookings that have been hired out by a customer. Hired bookings can only be moved to a different vehicle using the change booking function.
- Green - Returned bookings. These bookings have been returned by the customer.
- Green with stripes - Closed bookings. Bookings can be marked as 'Closed' once they are returned and have a balance owing of $0. These bookings can no longer be updated.
- Olive-Green - Maintenance Bookings. These indicated when a vehicle is undergoing maintenance, and they cannot be moved to a different vehicle.
- Grey - Non-Revenue Bookings. These are bookings that will not collect any revenue.
- Solid Orange - Allocated Reservations. These are bookings that have not yet been hired and will remain against their designated vehicle, and will not be shifted by the Engine.
- Transparent Orange - Unallocated Reservations. These booking have not yet been allocated or hired. They will appear in the booking sheet against the most-optimal vehicle according to the Engine's view of the best-fit for each reservation.
- Pink Border - On Request Bookings. These bookings have not yet been confirmed as a reservation. Similarly, to unallocated bookings, they will appear in the booking sheet against the most-optimal vehicle according to the Availability Engine.
- Black Border - Do Not Move Bookings. These are bookings that cannot be moved to a different vehicle, they can be Allocated Revenue or Non-Revenue bookings.
- Yellow - Alert Bookings. These are unallocated bookings that the Availability engine cannot assign to a vehicle, as there are no available vehicles of that category at the pickup location.
- Grey with a P in the Res Number - Placeholder Bookings. These are virtual bookings designed to hold a place in the schedule in which a vehicle will be transported from one location to another. They can be unallocated (transparent) or allocated to a vehicle (soldi).
Note : If you are interested in reviewing the Availability Engine functionality please contact : support@rentalcarmanager.com
Additional Notes:
- Configuration options are available to adjust rules based on turnaround gaps and sharing vehicles between locations.
- There are other configuration options for advanced usage, for example to return availability based on utilisation levels, or to keep some vehicles in reserve as a contingency.
Concept Diagram
Related Links
Important Articles
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