Filemaker Bookings and Reservation System
In this course we will learn to create a Filemaker system used for making reservations and booking items within a date range. In this example we will be using a hotel room as an example but this can equally be used for car rental, equipment rental, studio rental, library lending. In other words any system where you have items that are in use for specific periods of time.
What this system allows you to do is simply enter a start and end date and time and then the system returns a list of hotel rooms that are available within that period.
These free rooms can them immediately be booked or guests that walk in can immediately check in.
Included in the course are the original FIlemaker File plus extra Filemaker manuals.
Take this course if you want to simplify your business by creating an application that does all your administrative work exactly the way you want it. Completely tailored to your needs.
Tables and Layouts
Let's have a look at what we are going to make. Download the Filemaker file in the download tab to the right.
We will be renting out rooms but this could be anything that you rent or lend out to someone.
We will use a menu to be able to easily navigate between our different sections.
So we can have an overview of our rooms. Organized by type.
Here we will store the info on our guests.
Bookings and Reservations
Let's get started with the complicated stuff. Booking a room.
We need to make sure that only the rooms that are actually available show up in our free rooms list.
Let's create some buttons so we can easily book or check into one of the free rooms.
We would like to see all details of the booking plus have the ability to enter our guest information when we make a booking.
A handy overview of all the booked rooms. Sorted per day.
Actually checking in and checking out a guest. From the bookings list view
Let's make sure we don't make any incorrect bookings.
There is one big problem that we need to deal with before we can move on.
All of our rooms have features. It would be handy if we could include those in our search for rooms.
When guests want to check in or check out it's nice to have a list of all checked in guests as also a list of all people who are still going to arrive.
Sometimes it can be handy if you can immediately see exactly how many beds you have available.
Billing and Invoicing
At some point we will have to create a bill for our clients. And maybe some customers also need an invoice.
If our bill needs to become an invoice we need to be able to assign it an invoice number.
For the multiple items that can show up on our Bill or Invoice.
Let's make it so that we can enter a multiple prices per room type.
Displaying the prices on the Rooms layout and duplicating them to minimize repetitive work.
Now we get to choose which price we would like to use while booking a room.
We can already make an invoice or bill item even though we don't even have a bill yet.
Now that we have started to create bill items we can display them on our Bookings detail layout.
This can come in handy if a guest wants to know what the total price is going to be.
Most people will be wanting breakfast and that will have to be included on the bill.
If we add it as multiple lines per day we will be able to do some really cool things with this later on.
Now we can actually make the Bill / Invoice.
We can make the process a little bit better.
Now that we have all the info related to our Invoice we can make our Invoice List.
We are going to make it easy for ourselves to do predictable and useful finds.
A minor tweak to streamline things. And the addition of government tax.
Let's create the print version of our Bill / Invoice.
Further tweaks to our layout.
For this to work we will need a script.
Because, seriously, who still prints anyway?
So you don't have to print it at all.
Other Hotel related additions
We made separate lines for our breakfasts on the invoice. Now we are going to learn what kinds of cool things we can do with that.
We can look for the breakfasts of today and also turn our list into a handy checklist to check guests that actually take theirbreakfast.
Let's create the ability to add breakfasts right from the breakfast list.
If a guests shows up for breakfast unexpectedly we should be able to add their breakfast to the list.
So we don't accidentally create two breakfast lines for one person.
We can come up with all kinds of extra services that we would like to charge to our guests. Let's take an easy example and look at how this could work.
Lets try to find the simplest and most fun way to add these Laundry Items to our Bill.
Bar
For our bar section we will be trying out an entirely different technique.
If we can make a temporary list of the guests that are in our bar then that could be really helpful.
If we don't want to add the same guest multiple times we can create a dwindling value list.
Our bar will need a list of items we can sell.
Our bar will need a list of items we can sell.
When a new day starts we want to empty the guest list. Unless they have slept in our bar all night.
Let's congratulate ourselves and look at what we have learned.
