Notice Required
Purpose
When setting up your RCM Web Booking module you are able to specify a notice required period. This enables you to allow for the period of time it will require you to have a vehicle ready for a booking. Though there is a basic version of this that you can set up against each Web Location record, if you are wanting to have more flexibility in the setting of the notice required period, you can use the Notice Required form to setup more complicated instances. There is more information about the difference between these two options in the How It Works section later in the article.
The Notice Required form allows you to set the notice required period specifically for any combination of the following areas:
- Location,
- Category Type
- Category
- Website Bookings
- Agent Bookings
Accessing Notice Required
Notice Required can be accessed under the Website Interface menu.
Website Interface >> Web Locations >> Notice Required
Viewing, Adding and Updating Notice Required
If you are wanting to create a new record, click on the "Add Notice Required" link.
If you are wanting to update an existing Notice Required record, simply click on the Edit button for the relevant record.
When you add a new record, the following screen is displayed. The default values are shown below, you can change them. Once you are happy, click the Submit button to save the record.
| Location | The location that this Notice Required value will be applied to. This is related to the pickup location. It can be set to All Locations or a specific location. |
| Category Type | The Category Type that this Notice Required value will be applied to. It can be set to All Category Types or a specific category type. |
| Category | The Category that this Notice Required value will be applied to. It can be set to All Categories or a specific category. |
| Apply to website bookings | This flag determines whether this Notice Required value will be applied to bookings coming in via your website. |
| Apply to agent bookings | This flag determines whether this Notice Required value will be applied to bookings coming in via agent using the Agent API. |
| Hours notice required | The number of hours notice that are required when making a booking request. |
| Days notice required | The number of days notice that are required when making a booking request. |
| Same day booking cut-off time (minutes) | This is the cutoff time, in minutes, for bookings where the pickup date is today. There is more information on this in the How It Works section Below. |
Apply Cutoff to After Hours Only | This controls whether the set Same Day Cutoff time apply to all bookings, or just those with after-hour pickups. It is suggested that you use this if it takes longer to prepare for after-hours pickup, then one inside of office hours. There is more information on this in the How It Works section Below. |
How it Works
Notice Required records control the minimum time between when a booking is made and when its pickup can be. This is meant to allow your staff time to process the booking, take any payments or additional information that needs to be collected, and prepare the vehicle for hire.
Web Location
As mentioned in the beginning of the article, you are able to set up a Notice Required time against each Web Location Record. However, this field is done by days, and does not consider office hours. For example, if you set your location is set to have a 0.5 days’ Notice Required, it will not accept bookings less than 12 hours from now. So:
- If a booking is made at 9:00PM tonight, the pickup cannot be until 9:00AM tomorrow
- If a booking made at 6:00AM this morning, the pickup cannot be until 6:00PM tonight.
This does not consider that the time from 9:00PM to 9:00AM will mostly fall outside of office hours, with no staff to prepare the booking for hire, but 6:00AM to 6:00PM will mostly fall within office hours and so can be prepared for hire quicker.
Notice Required Records
As such, the Notice Required records provide a smarter way of dealing with this by considering office hours. This allows you to set much smaller Notice Required times as it does not have to allow for time when staff are not available. For example, if a Notice Required record is set to 4 hours, it will not accept bookings less than 4 hours from now. However, if the booking is made after office hours today or before office hours tomorrow, then it will not accept a booking less than 4 hours after the office opening hours tomorrow. So, if the office hours are from 6:00AM till 6:00PM:
- If a booking is made at 9:00AM today, the pickup cannot be till 1:00PM today
- If the Booking is made at 8:00PM tonight, this pickup cannot be until 10:00AM tomorrow (i.e. opening time + 4 hours)
Same Day Cut-Off
These Notice Required records also have a Same Day Cut-off time option. This is a length of time before the office closes that is considered to be outside office hours. This is because staff will be leaving, and if you allow after hours pickups, you don’t want a booking made half an hour before your office closes to be available for pickup tonight as there will be no one to prepare it for hire. For example, with the Notice Required value is 2 hours, the office hours are from 6:00AM till 6:00PM, and the Same Day Booking Cut-off is 3 hours:
- If a booking is made at 2:00PM today, the pickup cannot be till 4:00PM today.
- If a booking is made after 3:30PM, the pickup cannot be until 8:00AM tomorrow.
Apply Cutoff to After Hours Only
This controls whether the set Same Day Cutoff Time applies to all bookings, or just those with after-hour pickups. The above examples are for when this flag it set to No. It is suggested that you set it to Yes if it takes longer to prepare for after-hours pickup then one inside of office hours, and so it will ignore the Cutoff Time for inside office hour bookings. Using the same information as above, if this is set to Yes:
- If a booking is made before 2:00PM, the pickup can be from any time after 4:00PM today.
- If a booking is made at 3:30PM today, the pickup can be from 5:30PM till 6:00PM today, but it will not be available for pickups after 6:00PM, as these will be after hours bookings.
Verifying this information
You can check any of the changes that you make to this setup by using the Category Availability Check screen. If you want to check the settings for Agents, use the Agent Category Availability Check screen. These two screens will show you the information that will come back through either the Web API or the Agent API.
The Category Availability Check screen can be found here Website Interface >> Web Vehicle Categories >> Category Availability Check. The Agent version can be found under the Agent Booking Setup >> Agent Categories >> Agent Category Availability Check.
You can see in the image below that when we run the check for a booking less than 2 hours into the future, I get a message back letting me know why I can't do this. If you want to test what happens when the web request is made at different times, you can change the Pickup Location Date and Time field. For example, you can enter an after hours time, to see when the location will be available for booking based on whether the request was made during or after office hours.
Important Articles
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