Overview
Stay management refers to performing any of the following activities
- extending (or shortening) a stay
- moving a guest to a different suite
- changing the rate for a reservation
- adding incidentals to a stay
- tracking additional guests for a stay
- splitting rent charges for a stay
- billing incidentals to guests
Several of these options have dialogs accessible under "manage stay" on an order to walk you through the steps needed to complete these options. Extending (or shortening) a stay can be found under "modify Duration", "Change Rate" is used to change the rate for all or a portion of an existing stay and "Switch Suite" is used to change the Suite the guest is staying in. Other options involve Guest or "Split" type orders discussed below.
Types of Orders
The system supports two types of orders (or reservations), rent and Split (otherwise known as Guest) Orders. At a high level orders are used for controlling billing, each order, regardless of type, has one customer, this customer is who will be billed for charges on the order. To restate, the customer on the order will be the customer on the generated invoices.
Rent Orders
- allowed to have rent product (book suites)
- control the taxability status (based on length of stay) for a reservation
- enforce rent/stay rules - rent must be contiguous (no gaps), rent cannot overlap
Split Orders
- can be used to track guests arrival/departure seperate from reservation dates
- cannot contain direct rent (suite bookings)
- used for billing incidentals to guests
- used for splitting rent charges to guests
A reservation may only ever have one rent order, but it may contain zero to an unlimited amount of split orders.
Split Order Uses
There are multiple use cases for split type orders. A split order can be used for any one of these purposes, or for any combination of them.
Tracking Guests
In certain cases there may be a need to track additional guests moving in an out of a suite, with arrival and departure dates different from those for the reservation. For example a reservation is booked by an account for a 8 month stay, there will be one (primary) guest for the entire 8 months but the spouse of the primary guest will be moving in for three months in the middle of the reservation.
For this use case please see Adding Guests
Billing Incidentals to Guests
A common need is to bill incidental charges on a reservation to a guest. For example a reservation has an account customer who is being billed for rent and now a parking charge needs to be billed to the guest.
For this use case please see Billing Incidentals to Guests
Splitting Rent Charges
In some cases it may be required to bill a portion of rent charges to a different customer. For example an account may be paying $120 of rent per night but the reservation is in a suite that has a $130 per night charge, so now the $10 per night is "split" and charged directly to the guest.
For this use case please see Creating Split Reservations
Split Order Advanced Use Overview
Rolling Up Rent Charges
Split orders usually relate to one rent order. For example a split order with a rent split charge and a parking incidental both related to the same main rent stay. However, it is possible (allowed in the system) for a split order to relate to multiple rent orders. This makes it possible to roll-up charges from multiple rent orders onto one split order.
To roll up multiple rent charges to a split order you would simply split rent from multiple rent orders using the dialog, when asked what order to use for the split charges you would select an existing order - in this case the first one you created.
Split Orders with Accounts
While commonly referred to as "Guest" orders split orders can have any valid CRM customer record set as their customer. This means that either a Contact (Guest) or Account (company) can be set as the customer on the split order. This allows charges for a reservation to be potentially split among multiple Accounts, it also allows you to set a contact as the customer on the rent order and split rent to the account on a split order.
An example use of this last case is a reservation is booked from Sept 1 to Nov 30 by the account but the guest would like to extend an additional 10 days and they would be solely responsible for the rent during the extension. In such a case you can create the order with the guest as the customer, then create a split order for the period from Sept 1 to Nov 30 to bill the account for all the rent during that period.