Plan ahead for after-school, breakfast clubs and curricular activities with Advance Bookings. Find out how to set-up registers and timetables in advance, determine flexible payment options and booking windows with ease.

Setting up a club register

The register is the backbone of the Advance Bookings system. Completing this step allows you to configure base prices for clubs, select how you receive payments, assign students to the clubs, setup reminders, purchase windows and accounting information.

1) Within the left-hand menu, select Registers > Create New Register.

2) In the first input field, enter a name for the club register.

3) Next, select the type Club from the drop-down list.

4) Enter a description of the club register.

5) Click Add Members and the Contact Book will appear. Using the Contact Book, select the students you wish to add to the club and click Confirm.

6) By default, the schedule is set to Monday-Friday. If your school operates on Saturdays and/or Sundays, check the relevant boxes.

7) For both students and staff, select the bank accounts you wish payments to go into and, if applicable, input the information for your finance department:

• VAT Rate
• Department
• Cost Centre
• Nominal Code

8) Select which payment model you wish to use to collect payments:

9) Configure your price bands in the ‘Price Band’ section. The base price for the clubs are determined by the price bands the students are assigned to. To add students to the ‘Free Price Brand’, click the Pencil Icon; a new window will appear. Click ‘Edit Members’ to open the Contact Book and select the relevant students for this price band. Once you have selected the appropriate students, click ‘Confirm’ and ‘Save’:

10) Next, configure your paid price band by clicking ‘Create Band’; a new window will appear. Enter a name for the price band (this is for your reference only) and input the price you wish to charge for each club session.

Selecting the checkbox for ‘Default’ will automatically assign new students added to the register (who are not already in a price band) to the default price band upon saving. To add the relevant students to this price band, click ‘Edit Members’ to open the Contact Book. Select the appropriate students and click ‘Confirm’ and ‘Save’.

11) The purchase window is the time in which a parent can view, book and pay for items in a register. Select the number of days for each of the drop-down boxes for schedule settings:

Important: When setting the purchase window opening, the booking will become available for parents to view and purchase X set days in advance of the Monday of the template week.

12) Click Selected Users for 'Publish Reminders'; the Contact Book will appear. Select which ParentMail administrator(s) you wish to notify to publish an upcoming week yet to be published and click Confirm.

13) Once the previous steps have been completed, check through your setup to ensure all is correct and click Save.

Club templates

Club templates are for populating the schedule. You can create as many templates as required. To set up a template, you will need the club information to hand as well as any detail of additional charges which need to be applied in addition to the price bands students are assigned to.

Further instructions on creating a template are below:

• Creating a week club template
• Creating a day club template

5) Next, enable the selection you require for each day of the week, starting with Monday:

6) When you have configured the option for the day, click ‘Next Day’ and repeat the previous step until you have completed each day of the week. If you do not operate on Saturdays and Sundays, select 'Blank day'.

7) When you have completed each day of the week, click Save Template.

5) Enter a name for the day in the 'Day Name' field, e.g. 'Monday Week 1'.

6) Enter a name for the Session Group in the 'Session Group Title' field, e.g. 'After School Club'. You can run multiple clubs on a single day by clicking '+ Add Session Group'.

7) Within the 'Sessions' section, determine the session run-time by selecting the 'Start Time' and 'End Time' fields.

8) Click 'Add Optional Info' to include additional detail about the club. This will be displayed for parents when they are viewing the available options.

9) The price for the club is determined by the price bands the students are assigned to. If you wish to charge extra for a specific option, enter the additional amount in the 'Additional Price' field.

10) If required, you can add additional session times within the second fields for 'Start Time' and 'End Time'; click '+ Add Session' to add more sessions. Alternatively, you can remove the additional session field(s) by clicking '- Remove Session'.

11) Within the 'Availability' section, set the number of slots available for each time frame. An overlapping session will automatically use the slots set for the adjoining sessions.

12) When you have completed your club day template, click Save.

Setting up the Schedule

Once you have configured your menu templates, the next step is to create the schedule for the register. The schedule is a simple calendar feature that allows you to place the created templates on the desired days and weeks. You can schedule as many dates as needed; a week, month or term. The schedule can be edited and added to at any time.

1) Within the left-hand menu, select Registers > Registers and select the register you created earlier.

2) Click Actions > Schedule and the schedule for the register will be displayed:

3) You can add a template to the schedule for a week by clicking '+ Add Week', or an individual day by clicking '+ Add Day':

4) After populating the schedule with days/weeks, you can check and make any amendments to the day by clicking 'Edit Day'. A new window will appear displaying the options, with the option to Remove or Save.

Important: Once the schedule has been published, if any options have been chosen and paid for by the parents you are unable to make any changes to the prices for that week. Any transactions will need refunding first if price changes are required.

5) When you are ready to start allowing parents to select clubs and pay, click Publish for the week:

Schedule Features & Reports

When a week in the schedule has been published there are features available to view the stats of selections, print options and view reports:

• How to view selection stats
• How to print selections
• How to run reports

How to run reports

1) To run reports for the meal register, first locate the register by navigating to Registers > Registers within the left-hand menu.

2) Select the register you wish to run reports for from the list.

3) Click Actions and select Reports. The 'View Reports' window will be displayed.

4) From the list of reports, select which report you want to pull from the system and click Generate.

5) The report will take a few moments to generate the most up-to-date data. Once the report is ready, click CSV to download an excel document of the chosen report.

Important: Ensure to always click Generate before clicking CSV to download the report. Failing to click Generate will download previous generated data which in most cases is outdated information.