Settings that apply within an administration

Administration settings

In the administration settings, you can make various choices that determine how your guests enter their personal data and those of their travel companions for a reservation.

Administration settings for guests

Description of the park and its surroundings

Exclude postcodes

Period groups are applied to costs, packages, auto emails and discounts, to determine when these items are valid, active, and/or applicable.

Period groups

Reservation settings

In Administration settings, on the Bookings tab, you can set the general settings for reservations. This includes the minimum number of nights, default country, check-in and check-out times, how the Planboard optimizes bookings and for how long an option is valid. You can also enable the license plate module here.

Administration settings for bookings

Question after reservation

Per administration, you set the standard times for check-in and check-out. These times are communicated to your guests. It will remain possible to check reservations in or out at any time via the backoffice.

Set check-in and check-out times

During booking on your own website, guests may be asked 'how did you find us?'. In administration settings, you can set the possible answers to that question as traffic sources.

Traffic sources

Manage channels through which reservations are made

Channel management

Channels create insight into how a reservation was made. Your own website and the back office have their own channel, and there are dedicated owner channels as well. Many OTA integrations automatically create a channel for themselves, for some this needs to be done manually.

Create a new channel

Standard channel for back office reservations

When the channel is first created, the default payment policy is applied as standard. You can select a different payment policy if desired.

Connecting a payment policy to a channel

Allotments

Availability of types per channel

Guests pay on arrival

Measuring bookings from unconnected Channels

Determine for each distribution channel how long an unconfirmed reservation can be valid before lapsing.

Validity of unconfirmed reservations per channel

Financial settings for channel settlements

Channel invoicing

It is possible to differentiate the prices you send to each channel by editing a price factor in the channel settings.

Edit the price factor of a channel 

General invoicing and accounting settings

Financial settings

If you work with multiple currencies, the different exchange rates are automatically updated every night. However, it is also possible to fix an exchange rate to a specific value.

Adjusting exchange rates

Your cancellation policy applies to any cancelled reservation within your administration. Edit your cancellation policy to determine the amount of the cancellation fee.

Determining cancellation fees in a cancellation policy

You can set different currencies in BEX PMS based on your own needs. During onboarding, you and the Booking Experts team determine which currencies are necessary for your park to operate.

Using multiple currencies

Within the Invoice tab in the Administration settings, you can enter payment information, determine invoicing settings, set invoice templates, and more.

Administration settings: Invoices

In the bookings tab of your administration settings, you can choose to invoice your guests upon confirmation, check-in, or check-out. This choice has an effect on the way payments and order changes are handled. It also affects the invoice date registered in your accounting.

When to invoice guests: booking invoice date

Additional mention of bank details in invoice footer

For proper accounting, you want to be able to close and lock financial records to ensure that no further mutations take place. This is typically done after the audit and tax return of a fiscal year.

Closing and locking financial records

You can choose to display the price per person per night on invoices, as standard.

Show price per person per night on invoices

Edit invoice number prefix

The administration settings regarding the invoice moment (when a booking invoice is created) and journalization (when turnover is recorded), together affect your accounting process. Various combinations are possible.

Correlation between invoice moment and journalization

Depending on your invoicing and journalization settings, you may invoice revenue before you wish to acknowledge it in your accounting. To manage this correctly, you need the general ledger account 'Pre-invoiced turnover' as a distribution key.

Distributing revenue via 'Pre-invoiced turnover'

To distribute revenue from long-term reservations across multiple months in your accounting, the invoice date must fall within the first month of the realization period. By using payment terms, you ensure that your guests can continue to pay in installments throughout the realization period.

Distributing revenue from seasonal or annual pitches

Everything about communicating with guests and owners

Communication

Setting up communication by email

You can send emails like booking confirmations, auto emails and email campaigns from both the BEX PMS and CMS. You can customise the email address from which these emails are sent.

Verify your sender email address

Avoiding spam when sending email campaigns and auto emails

Difference between auto emails and templates

Email variables are pieces of code you can use in your emails and templates to customise the message for the recipient. Email variables take data from the reservation and apply it to the message that is being sent to the guest. Here, you'll find a list of the most often used variables.

Email variables for auto emails and templates

If/else tags in Templates

BCC / receive e-mail copy

Bird

Auto emails

System messages that are triggered by an event

Templates

Translations

You can use the translation module to have content from the BEX PMS automatically translated, saving you as a user a lot of time.

Translation module BEX PMS

Search for any helpful articles to find an answer to your question

www.bookingexperts.com

Developer Portal

Updates

Onboarding

What you need to know before starting the onboarding process

Before you start

Welcome to Booking Experts! Here you can find an overview of what happens next and how to start with your BEX PMS.

Starting with Booking Experts

Log in to your Booking Experts account in one of the following ways: with an email address and password with MFA, or via SSO through a Google or Microsoft account.

Log in to BEX PMS or CMS

The user role connected to your account determines how you interact with BEX PMS. You can be an employee working for a single or multi-park organization, an owner who rents out their accommodation, an executor or contractor who performs maintenance or provides services, or even a travel agency booking holidays for your clients. For BEX CMS, there is only one user role.

User roles within BEX PMS and CMS

The light green upper part of the menubar focuses on options regarding the account details, updates of Booking Experts, or reception messages.

Menubar in the BEX PMS

Every employee who uses the Booking Experts system has their own profile within the software. This is setup during onboarding or when a new colleague needs to be introduced to the system.

Adjusting your profile

Tools to help you in the onboarding process

Checklist and Academy

About the safety of your and your guests' data

Privacy and security

Modules

About data transferable from other systems

Importing data

Organization and administration settings

All organizations with multiple administrations have an Organization overview. In this overview, as an organization manager, you have insight into the bundled data of all administrations.

Overview for organizations with multiple administrations

What you need to know about setting up accounts for your employees

Employee settings

Brand and appearance

Central management of terms and conditions

Terms & Conditions

Domains

Setting up objects

Amenities

Individual objects and the types they belong to

Types and objects

Media content

Set up your pricing and business finances

Prices and finances

Important financial settings

Rental prices for various types and periods of time

Price lists

Add cost items for add-ons and separate fees

Costs

Setting up CMS

Switching between BEX PMS and BEX CMS

As a park manager, you can create CMS accounts for employees and manage their rights.

Access rights for CMS users

Tools

Site settings

Website pages

How reservations are made through your website

Search & Book

Brand appearance

Email campaigns

Offering holiday homes for sale on your website 

Sales module

If you are using both ParcVu and BEX CMS with the sales module, you can connect the two to easily generate prospects out of interested website visitors. Set up a form on your CMS website to ask for the details needed to create a prospect in ParcVu.

Connect to ParcVu using a form

All day-to-day actions necessary at your reception

Daily use of PMS

Dashboard

Getting started with the reservations module and reception messages

Reservations and messages

BEX PMS

Planboard

Select an available date range directly at the correct object by clicking and dragging, or first create a shortlist of objects using the filters at the top of your planboard.

Making a new reservation via Planboard

The planboard settings are accessible through the 'Settings' button in the top right of the planboard screen, next to your account name.

Planboard settings

The planboard legend is accessible through the 'Legend' button in the top right of the planboard screen, in between 'Hotkeys' and 'Settings'.

Planboard legend: what it all means

The planboard filters can be used to find certain reservations, or to narrow down the availability for a new reservation.

Available filters for the Planboard

Convenient keyboard shortcuts that may make your work easier.

Hotkeys for Planboard

Click on the relevant reservation in the planboard, and the detail view will open on the right. At the bottom of this view, under 'actions', you'll see today's date and time and the button to either check in or check out this reservation.

Checking guests in and out via the Planboard

Using the PMS planboard, you can easily move a reservation to a different object, or make two reservations switch places.

Move or swap a reservation in the Planboard

A cluster is a combination of multiple objects, which are treated as a single object in the Planboard.

Cluster reservation in the Planboard

Planboard - Date selection

Planboard - Order of objects

Planboard - Switching between administrations

Planboard - View reservation

Planboard - Search function

Planboard - Opening and closing

Planboard - Display mode, colours and symbols

Settings that apply to your entire organization

Organization settings

A label alerts the user to important matters concerning the various modules and data within the PMS. For example, you could give the label 'loyal guest' to guests who have stayed for the fourth time, or the label 'renovated' to objects that have been refurbished. You can create these labels yourself and give them a desired colour and emoji.

Purpose of labels

Special periods are used in Statistics, Price lists and in the Search and Book. Examples of special periods are public holidays, local events or holiday periods.

Special periods

Creating and editing Special periods

It is possible to make predefined holidays and bank holidays visible on your website, so guests can click on them or more easily search for availability, for example, during the Christmas period. 

Set holidays as selectable on your website

Employees

Manage the amenities of your types, objects and administrations

Brands

Manage your booking portal and customer portal

Portal settings

For each administration separately, financial records can be locked and closed for accounting purposes. In your organization settings, you can prevent them from being reopened across your administrations.

Preventing closed financial records from being reopened

About types, objects, availability and meter readings

Setup

Whether or not a late checkout is allowed, is determined in the settings of the booked type. 

How to set up and recognize a late check-out

How do you indicate whether or not pets are allowed? This is done per object, in the object setup. In the type settings, you can set how many pets guests are allowed to bring, but this only applies if the booked object allows pets.

Pets allowed/not allowed

In the BEX PMS, you can add media to your types and objects so that guests can get a good impression of the kind of accommodation they are booking.

Add media to types and objects

How to make exports of your types, objects, or object setups.

Export of objects/types

In auto emails and templates, you can add useful information about an object or type that is predefined in the object or type settings.

Attachment text for emails objects/types

If you have a map, you can use it to let the guest choose an object on the map during the reservation process. This allows guests to choose the spot that best suits their personal wishes. This article explains more about creating, setting up and booking on a map.