The booking form for hiring the hall is implemented using the Caldera Forms plugin and as well as sending the confirmatory emails it records every booking submitted in a table accessible from the web site dashboard.
Handling a New Booking
| If you login to the web site and look down the left hand dashboard icons you’ll see Caldera Forms, hover over that to see the popup for the form tables and click on the one for Hall Booking. |  |
|
When you have selected Hall Booking you will see a summary table of all the hall bookings. You can use the View button next to each entry to view all the details and optionally edit the entry. You may use the Bin button to move the entry to the waste bin (it won’t be deleted from there so a booking can be recovered if needed). |
|
|
|
|
|
The newest bookings will be shown at the top of the table and the first steps to take for a new booking are to:
To update any entry click on the View button at the right hand end of the row for the entry you want to examine or change.
|
 |
|
From the view screen click on the Edit Entry button to load the hall booking form with the data fields filled in. You will not be able to see some of the fields until you change an item of data, furthermore you will not be able to save any changes without checking the two consent fields near the bottom of the form. Immediately check the two consent fields at the bottom of the form and you will see the administration fields appear. Complete the Invoiced Amount field and set the Status field to Requested or Confirmed. Click on Save Changes. Warning: usually the screen will not refresh poperly after clicking on Save Changes and you will see a spinning grey dotted circle: don’t worry your changes will have been saved almost immediately. After a couple of seconds you should close the edit window using the X at the top right of the window, and refresh your browser page by clicking on the circular arrow to the left or the URL bar. You should now see you changes such as the invoiced amount in the summary line. If not, just edit the form again and wait a little more than a couple of seconds (5 should certainly be enough). |
 |
Adding a Calendar Entry
|
If the booking is for a Hall Hire you can download the data to add to the calendar ready for upload to Google. To save the calendar data check the box to the left of the entry (or multiple entries) you want to add to the calendar. At the top of the form use the Bulk Actions drop down list to select Export Selected. Click on the Apply button and save the file to your local machine; it doesn’t matter where you save the file or what name you use so long as you remember where you saved it. |
 |
|
Open the Parish Hall Google Calendar. You can use this Google Calendar link or go to the Hall Home page and click on the coloured + Google Calendar link at the bottom of the Event Calendar button (on the right of the first row). On the calendar page go to the Settings icon ( top right near your picture), click on the icon and choose Settings from the drop down list.
|
 |
|
On the settings page click on Import & Export in the left hand column. Click on the box labelled Select file from your computer and select the file you exported earlier. In the next box down select EWPH20 Events from the list (or EWPH Events if EWPH20 is not shown). Now click on Import and you hall booking will be added to the calendar. |
 |
|
Use the left arrow at the top of the settings screen to return to the calendar and find your new entry and click on it to view the entry and check that it is correct and to set the appropriate event colour. |
 |
|
To set the event colour click on the pencil icon and update the colour swatch next to the name of the calendar (about half way down the screen on the left). The colours we use are:
Click on the Save button (top right) to save your changes. |
 |
Invoice Management
We’ve provided a hall booking Status field which initially has the values:
- Requested
- Confirmed
- Invoice issued
- Invoice paid
- Invoice overdue
- Cancelled
The suggestion is that the treasurer can, if they so require, update the status to track whether a give hire has been invoiced and paid for. This way anyone can view the paid/unpaid status of a booking. Additional status values can be added and the treasurer may choose to handle invoicing differently and not use this feature.
Booking Lifecycle
Once a booking event has taken place and the invoice paid there is no need to keep the booking in the table shown on the Hall Booking page. Use the Bin button against the entry to move it to the waste bin where it will remain as an archived event.
Similarly events that are cancelled can have their status set to Cancelled and move to the Bin area. Don’t forget to mark the event on the calendar as cancelled (preferred) or just remove the entry from the calendar.
