| Step By Step Tutorial
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| In a few words, the ARMS framework works this way: after signup your ARMS
account is created (this is completely free for 30 days) and you can
add a number of resources to your account (a resource is anything you want
to offer for reservation). For each resource the ARMS framework automatically
generates the resource calendar based on the information you entered
during signup and from administration area (created for you after the signup).
You obtain the links to the resource calendar from resources administration
area and put those links into the pages of your website. Your customers will be
able to see the resource calendar and make online reservations. |
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| 1. Signup
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| Gather Signup
Information |
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| The signup is simple two pages wizard. In the first page you have to enter
simple contact information like the email, name and a password you'll have to
use to login into your administration area. You will not be asked to enter
any credit card information or other sensitive information. You'll be asked to
do this if you decide to suscribe to our services during the 30 day free
trial period. |
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| Signup Preview
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| After you pressed the Next button you'll have the possibility to review the
information you entered. If something is wrong you can simply press the Edit
button and you'll be able to modify any existing data you entered |
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| 2. Setup |
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After the signup wizard your account is already created and you could stop the
signup process at this moment. However, you have the possibility to continue
with the setup wizard. With the setup wizard you can customize the
template resource that is automatically created by the
framework immediately after the signup step. As we mentioned in the
product prensentation page, you can define more then one resource in your
account, but you can do it only after the setup wizard is finished and you
login your account.
When you login into your account you'll be taken to the administration index
page.
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| At the top of the page you'll be able to see all the
reservations made today for the current resource. You can also select the
current resource. By default, when you login into your account,
the selected resource is the template resource that you created and
customized in setup wizard. |
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| Settings
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| In the settings page you can set the resource availability (global season), a
time frame in which you don't want to accept reservation, the reservation types
and the reosource dictionary. |
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| Reservation Types |
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Type of Reservation
This relates to the type of reservations available. For
example: 1 Day, 2 Days, 3 Days, 1 Week, or what ever else
you might need. You can add up to 24 reservation types at this moment, each of
them having an automatically assigned color code. When adding a new resource
the information that you entered on the page is automatically saved.
On
This activates the specified reservation type named to the left of the
check box.
Details
Checking these boxes will allow your customers to see the details
of their choice. You can later set the reservation details for individual
reservation types in the Details page that you can access from administration
index. Your customers will see the details you entered on the resource calendar
page after a day is selected from the calendar.
Policy
Checking these boxes will allow you to set the reservation policy
individually for each reservation type. You can set the reservation policy
for individual reservation types in the Reservation Policy page that
you can access from administration index. Your customers can see the
reservation policy you entered on the resource calendar page.
Amount
Price for the a exclusive reservation of this reservation type. Te
value is to be entered with two decimal spaces
For example: XXX.XX
Delete
The Delete button allows you delete the reservation
type. You'll not be able to delete a reservation type for which there are
already bookings in the system.
Move
The Up and Down buttons allows you to change the order of appearance
of reservation types on the customers calendar.
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| Global Season |
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| This is for you to decide how far in advance you would like to
take bookings. You may go as far in advance as you would like, simply
choose from the drop down menus. This option is also useful to keep
people from booking too far in advance. |
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| No Online Bookings |
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This option is to ensure that someone does not book a reservation on hardly any
notice, such as, while your sleeping. The beginning time is the time at
which the hour countdown will start every day. BOTH
fields must be filled in for this option to work. We highly recommend
that you use this option for your own protection.
Please note that to the right it says is the time-zone that our
server is in, so this is the time-zone needed for this feature.
For example if you have set the Beginning at 12:00AM and the period is set
to 12 hours, no reservation can be made for the current day before 12:00
PM. This ensures that nobody can make a reservation over the night or very
early in the morning.
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| Display Settings |
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| This is where you can set what information is displayed to
your customers in the calendar. |
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| Dictionary |
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| ARMS Framework is a generic calendars generator but your needs are
very particular of course. This is where you can say what your resource
shares are and what text to be displayed on the customers calendar for the
prices table. For example, if your resource is a room with many places the
resource is the room and the shares are room places. |
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| Advanced
Settings |
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| After the signup wizard your account is already created and you could stop the
signup process at this moment. However, you have the possibility to continue
with the setup wizard. During this step you can customize the template resource
that is automatically created immediately after the signup step. As we
mentioned in the product prensentation page, you can define more then one
resource in your account, but you can do it only after the setup wizard is
finished and you login your account. |
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| Shared Reservations |
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Type of Reservation
This is the name of the reservation that you set in the calendar
settings.
On
This activates the shared reservation for that reservation type.
Price
Set the price for your shared reservation
format: $ xx.xx
Deposit
Optional - activating this will allow you to take deposits.
Max # Shares
This set the maximum number of shares available for the shared
reservation
Confirm reservation
This sets the number of shares needed to make the reservation confirmed.
At this moment a confirmed reservation is just for your information to see if a
shared reservation type exceded a certain number of shares booked. You can even
mark this on the customer calendar if you need.
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Show Confirmed Reservation
Colored on Calendar
Optional - will highlight any confirmed
reservations on the calendar. At this moment the only usage of this
feature is to offer you the possibility to highlight the shared reservations
that exceded a certained number of shares reserved.
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| Reservation Types Compatibility |
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| One of the more advanced features is the reservation
types compatibility matrix feature. By configuring the
compatibility matrix you will enable yourself to book, for instance, a Morning,
Afternoon, and Night reservation all on the same day if you
so desire. If you choose to do only one reservation per day do not
check this box. Or you can check individual boxes. You can for
example only choose to multiple book morning and afternoons
if you like.
In the example above the reservation types are not compatible, If someone
booked a resource for 2 days someone ele cannot book the same resource for 3
days. However, for shared reservation types someone can reserve a number of
shares for 2 days and someone else can reserve a number of the shares of the
same resource for 3 days. In this case the compatibility matrix must be relaxed
a little bit and allow incompatible reservation types to share the same
resource shares in a day. You can do this if you check on the "" option. By
default this options is checked on. See the rooms reservations demo for a
better aunderstanding.
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| Mini Seasons |
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| Allows you to set a season individually for each type of
reservation. |
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| Multiple Days Reservations |
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| Here you can set the types of reservations extended on many days
and on how many days they are extended. |
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| Calendar Settings |
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| This allows you set the available types of reservations for any calendar day.
By default all enabled reservation types are available. you can set separately
the availability for exclusive and shared reservations. If a day has single
option, then that day will be appear colored in the corresponding color on the
calendar. |
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| Mark the Following Days Unavailable
This option is for your days off if you choose to have any, here we can
make any day of the week unavailable for the entire month, when the days
are selected and you have pressed the SAVE button your changes will taked
effect immediately. By selecting all and pressing save you will make the
entire month unavailable in case of emergencys.
Apply these settings to all available months
This option simply puts your settings for your unavailable days for this
month and spreads them to every available month. If you have set a Global
Season in the calendar settings page then the selected week days are
marked as unavailable for all the season months, otherwise the days are marked
unavailable for the current calendar year
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| Payment
Settings
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| MerchantID And Online Payment |
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| This is where you can set the Paypal merchant ID and say if you
want to accept online payment or not |
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As we said before, in order you accept online payments you will need a valid
Paypal account and also make some settings in your Paypal account (you
have to login to Pypal website) that will instruct the payment process to
return to ARMS web site after a successfull payment and mark the reservation as
payed. From your Paypal account go to Profile tab, Website
Payment Preferencesand enable Auto Return,
set the Return URL to any valid URL (the ARMS will
automatically and temporary set this address to ARMS site before the payment is
made by your customers), enable the Payment Data Transfer.
After you have enabled Payment Data Transfer option a Paypal Identity
Token is generated and you can see it right under the Payment Data Transfer
option on the website payment preferences page. You have to copy that token and
save it into you ARMS account in the Merchant Identity Token box.
This is enables ARMS to make verifications against the payment notification
from Paypal and prevent any possible fraud.
If don't wish to accept the online payment for reservations or the online
payment is not possible (for example you can't get a Paypal account) then you
have the option to accept online reservations requests. To enable the
resevation requests you have to check on the 'Accept reservations requests'
checkbox. After a reservation request the day will not be automatically marked
as booked in the calendar. This will happen only if you manually activate the
reservation request. The reservation requests appear in the 'Reservation
Requests Reports' section. To activate or cancel a reservation request you have
to enter the reservation request details and change the reservation status. If
a reservation request is activated then it will become a reservation and it
will appear in the 'Reservation Reports' section from administration.
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| Payment Type |
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| This is where you will select whether you would like your
customers to have to make a full payment only, deposit only or a deposit and
full payment .
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| The 'Full payment Only Within' allows you to ask for a full
payment for any reservation made on a date close to the reservation date. This
can be used to keep people who book on short notice from cancelling a few days
prior to the reservation.
In the example above, the resource has elected to require a deposit or full
payment option; however, if the reservation is booked within two days from the
reservation date, full payment will be the only option given to the customer.
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| You can change the currency in which you accept payments from your
customers from here. |
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| The default currency is USD if nothing is set. |
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| Reservation
Type Details
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| This is where you can set the reservation type details for
each reservation type that had the Details enabled in the calendar
settings page.
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| Reservation
Policy
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| These text fields are for you to enter you personal reservation
policy. Please keep in mind that if you elect to mention your deposit
percentages, to make sure that they match with the custom deposits that you
previously selected. We also recommend that you use your own reservation policy
so that there is never any confusion between you and your customer. |
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| Resources
Management |
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| During the signup process a template resource is created.
After you have logged in into your administration area, you can add as many
resources as you need. At any moment of time, when logged in administration
area, you have a currently selected resource that you are managing. The current
resource is displayed in the page header. You can select a new current
resource, add a new resource, delete or edit a resource from resources
administration page. |
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From here you can also see the calendar for the resource as it appears to the
customers and even more make admin reservations. When making an admin
reservation the customer calendar has a special feature that allows you go back
to the administration area. When making admin reservations, the online payment
is disabled. You can use this feature if you want to make reservation from your
reception desk directly if you want.
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| When adding a new resource you can specify if you want to "clone"
an existing resource or you want to make create an empty one. |
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| Also when adding a new resource or editing a new one you have the
option to disable or enable the resource. A disabled resource will not appear
in the automatically generated list of resources sown to the customer. |
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| For each resource you have the HTML link to the resource
calendar displayed to the customer and also to the resources page displayed to
the customer. |
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| You can use this information to easily integrate the ARMS
calendars into your existing website. |
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| 3.
Reservations Management
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| The life cycle of a reservation does not end after the reservation
was created. You can see the reservation details in your administration
area. Moreover, you can change the reservation type, reservation date, customer
details and the system can ensure the reservations consistency. |
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| You can see the exclusive reservations in the reports entry from
administration area. |
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| you can separately see the pending reservations (future
reservations) and past reservations, you can filter the reservations by
customer name, order number (assigned during the online payment for
reservation) or reservation date and you can order the
reservation alphabetically or by the reservation balance. |
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| When you click on the customer name you'll see the reservation
details. |
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You can change the reservation date by clicking on a date from the right side
calendar. The selected date will appear on left side. To move the reservation
on that date you simply have to click the Save button. You can cancel
the reservation by changing the reservation status from Active to Canceled. You
can even change the reservation mode from exclusive to shared and from shared
to exclusive. The Amount Due balance will be automatically adjusted.
You can change the amount payed for the reservation and this will be
automatically reflected in the Amount Due. To completely delete a
reservation from the system user the Delete Booking button.
If this is a reservation request details then you can change the reservation
status from 'Pending' to 'Active' or 'Canceled'.
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| On the same page you can see or modify the customer details. |
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| To see the shared reservations you have to
use the Shared Reporta entry from your administration index. Unlike the
exclusive reservations , a shared reservation can have multiple customers. |
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| When you click on the Enter link all the shared
reservations made for the day/reservation types will be presented. |
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| In our example there are two reservations made for the resource of
type '1 Day' made on 04/27/2006. When you click on the customer name
you can see and modify the reservation details exactly as in the case of
exclusive reservations that we presented earlier. |
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| If the reservation already happend (past reservation) you'll not
be able to change the reservation details anymore. When you click on the
customer name to see the reservation details you'll actually see a report
with all the reservations made by that customer, both past and pending. |
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Subscription Management
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| Afte the signup you have 30 days to pay for the subscription. You
can do this from the 'Subscription' entry from administration
index. You can choose between the ARMS Professional or ARMS Basic at this
moment. With ARMS Prfessional you'll be able to accept reservations from the
resources calendars. With ARMS Basic you can only present to your customers the
availability of the resource. The subscription payment is made with
Multicards.com. Muticards can offer all necessary security when
processing credit card payments. |
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| When you click the subscribe button you'll be taken to page where
you'll see a summary of what you are going to pay based on the subscription
type you have chosen. You'll also be asked to enter a password that you can use
later to change your subscription details like the subscription period or to
cancel the subscription. We'll be notified about any change you made against
your subscription and we'll act accordingly. For example, if you cancelled your
subscription we'll suspend your ARMS account. Disabled account means that you
won't be able to present the calendar to your customers but you'll still
be able to enter into your administration area. You can reactivate
the account when you'll renew your subscription. |
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| 5.
Customer Calendars
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| All the work you do in the administration area has as a final goal
the creation and customization the calendars that are presented to your users.
A calendar is generated by ARMS Framework for each resource that you defie into
your account and a page with links to all the account resources is
automatically generated by ARMS based on the information you enter in the
administration area. |
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| When the customer clicks on a link to a resource the resource
calendar page will be displayed. |
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In the calendar header there is your business name and a link to your
website if you have chosen to show them to your customers.
The calendar has a color for each day based on the reservation types that day
can offer. If the day has only one option the day is colored with corrsponding
reservation type color. In the example above, the 29th day accepts only '1 Day
Reservation' reservation type because the 30th is already booked.
Below the calendar there is the color legend that applies to this resource.
On the right panel there are shortcuts to the calendar moths for the selected
year and links to the next two years of the calendar. There are also links to
the enabled reservation policies for each reservation type.
When you click on a an available day from the calendar you'll be taken to
page that shows all the possible reservation types for that day. The
available reservation types are separately presented for exclusive and shared
modes. You can switch between the two modes using the radio buttons below the
calendar.
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On the right panel there are links to the enabled reservation type details. When
the selected mode is shared, the number of available shares is also presented.
After the desired reservation type and reservation mode were selected by the
customer, the Book Now button will take the customer to the
reservation payment page.
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| Here the customer must enter the information that will be
regitered into the ARMS database, will select the payment option (full payment
or deposit if you enabled deposit payments) and the payment method (reservation
request or online payment). |
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| From here the customer can go back to the resource calendar. |
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