Example: How to setup a community room rental

Example: How to setup a community room rental

Overview

Situation: A HOA has a community room amenity available for rental.   
Policy:
  1. 1 rental per day. 
  2. The rental can occur anytime between 9am and 9pm.
  3. Residents can pay $250 for the rental and must also make a $200 refundable deposit.  
  4. The rental must be approved by management.  The rental must abide by strict HOA guidelines.  No teen parties. 
  5. If a resident wishes to cancel or reschedule a rental, they must contact management directly.  
  6. Residents can reserve the room anytime of year.  

What booking portal features are we going to use?  

  1. Since the reservation is a time that will be requested by the member, we are going to build a Service.  
  2. Since the rental needs approved by the HOA property manager, they will be added as a Service Owner and the Approval feature will be used. 
  3. Since the rental needs a payment plus return of the deposit, the Fees, Refund, & Booking features will be used to track payments, refunds, and notes. 

Step 1) Create a new service

Use a name and description to help your members choose the service.  The category is optional.  
To learn how, CLICK HERE (part 1).  

Step 2) Edit the service settings

This is the second part of our general help article.  We'll recommend your settings below. 

  1. Click Service Owner.  (CLICK HERE to read more about service owners here)
  2. Select the service owner.  
  3. Click OK
In this scenario, the HOA property manager will be the service owner.  

  1. Service Opens After: Unchecked.  Since the rental may occur year round, leave the 3 availability options unchecked.   
  2. First available Booking: Unchecked.
  3. Last Booking Before: Unchecked.
  4. Requires Membership: Not all residents my be "Members".  Leaving this unchecked is better for this scenario.    
  5. Limit Daily Bookings: One (1).  Since you limit the room to one rental per day.  Uncheck or adjust if you allow multiple rentals per day.  

  1. Service Hours of Operation: Check Sun- Sat and add the hours, 9am to 9pm.  These are the times a rental can occur.    
  1. Booking Instructions: In this scenario, we're letting the resident know how they are getting approved and when they will get instructions to unlock the doors.  
  1. Interval Length: 12 hours because members have access to the room all day (1 rental per day).  
  2. Max Intervals: 1 because there is only 1 rental per day.  
  3. Pre & Post Buffer: In this scenario, you do not need to use this feature. In other cases, you may need this for setup or cleanup time in-between services. 
  4. Required Lead Time before Booking:  7 days because you want to give your property manager time to approve.  It prevents last minute bookings.     
  5. Align Bookings: On the top of the hour.
  6. Allow Overlapping Bookings: Unchecked (not applicable)     

  1. Base Cost: $450 because this is the total amount you need to collect.  $250 rental fee plus $200 deposit.  
  2. All other payment options: NA/$0.00 - In this scenario.

  1. Allow Cancellation: Unchecked.  These are for scenarios where management does not want residents to cancel bookings themselves.  All cancelations must be done by management.    
  2. Allow Rescheduling: Unchecked.  All rescheduling must be done by management.
  3. Auto Refund Fee on Cancellation: NA  
  4. Minimum Time for Patron to Reschedule/Cancel: NA    
  5. Email Service Owner on Booking Activity: Checked.  The Property Manager would like an email notification.  This alerts them to approve the booking.    

  1. Additional Patron Questions: In this scenario, we added three additional questions to help the property manager approve the rental and communicate with the resident.  

  1. Terms & Conditions: In this case, add your reservation T&C's, rules, setup procedure, and cleanup procedure.  Not only do they need to agree to them, they will be added to all confirmation screens and notifications.  In this scenario, you'll write your deposit policy here.      

Step 3) Save & Test


  1. Don't forget to Save.  Any changes will not be visible on the live booking calendar until you click SAVE.  
  2. Click Go to Patron Booking Page to view and test your service.  

How will the service/bookings be managed? 

How will the property manager approve the rental?
The property manager gets an email alert when a booking is made.  They will then view the booking and approve.  (CLICK HERE to learn how)

How will the deposit get refunded?  
After the community room is checked for damages, the property manager will issue a $200 refund back to the credit card they used.  (CLICK HERE to learn how)

Notes

We did not need or use the following features & settings.  
  1. Resources: Resources are not required for services.  In this case, we did not add the "Community Room" as a resource.  If your community room is also used for "board meetings", "community parties", "special events", etc., then you can add a resource to prevent double bookings.      
  2. Availability: We did not need to add any special dates/times.  The service is already 24/7/365.
  3. Blocks: We did not need to add any blocks when the community room was unavailable.