One of the powerful features of BRM is that it not only lets you make bookings against your fleet, but it lets you define exactly how each bike within a booking needs to be set-up to satisfy the client(s) demand(s).

For example a client advance-books 2 road bikes for July.  Sure, an important part of BRM's service is the ability to block out those 2 bikes for the given dates, to make sure you can fulfill the order without fear of double-booking etc.  However just noting down the bikes and the dates won't be enough information to deliver quality service.  You will undoubtedly have extra information from your clients that you need to record.  You could just keep that in a series of emails, but that won't help you on a busy day when you need to get the right bikes, set up correctly, to the right client.

What BRM lets you do, is record this EXTRA information, right where its needed against the ACTUAL bike within the ACTUAL reservation.  For example the rider name, size, pedal selection etc.

In fact there are really two types of extra information you may want to record for your advance bookings:

  1. textual information.  Free-form text that helps you deliver a quality service. For example in our example above, John is 5'10" and booked a 57cm Trek road bike.  His wife Sarah is 5'5" and booked a 54cm Merckx.  So there is room to write the rider NAME and SIZE against each bike within each reservation.  In fact there are several fields that you can choose from:  Name, Size, Pedal choice, Helmet, Panier, Telephone Number.  Because they are free-form text you are free to describe them in whatever format makes sense for your business.  Eg.  5'10"  or 1.78m or 'A: 79 cm, B: 83cm and C: 64 cm' (A, B, C measurements of your road bikes). You can also customise which of these fields is displayed / hidden for each type of reservation.
  2. checkboxes. Sometimes you don't want to write text, you just want to know if the client wants the option or not.  There may or may not be a cost associated with that option.  For example, in our option above, John is going to take a GPS with his bike.  So in our settings we have configured GPS as an optional extra.  So every bike in every booking comes with the 'GPS' checkbox.  In John's case we tick the box.  If there is a cost associated with the item, you have two choices as to how you price that up:
  3. Simple pricing.  Here you might specify that, for example a helmet costs 1 Euro extra per bike, per reservation.  Regardless of duration of booking.
  4. Complex pricing. With a premium item, like a GPS as in our example above, its likely that we'd want to charge it out on a 'per-day' basis.  In order to do that BRM supports the ability to offer complex pricing of extras. In other words, you define a profile for the given item, which dictates how much it will cost across any duration.  (it may or may not be linear)

Adding checkbox extras

here is an image showing how you set up checkbox extras in your settings:

1. choose a name for your extra - keep it short

2. add it with "add extra Col with name" button.

But what about tracking the inventory (availability etc) of my extras?

The above-mentioned mechanisms for tracking who needs which extras does not track your availability.

If you really need BRM to track your availability you have no choice but to list each 'extra' as a rental item.  (e.g. a GPS device would have its own row in the spreadsheet, like a bike).  But we don't recommend you do this for helmets, repair kits.  The management overhead would quickly outweigh any benefits you get.

Please note that items listed in the spreadsheet count towards your rental-item count in your BRM subscription.

Adding Images for your extras (online booking)

You can upload images for your extras -

  1. Either use one of our stock images
  2. OR upload your own.

Adding Extras Description for online tool

You can add Display Description that will show in the online tool when customers hover over the extra images. They are set here:

Setting Extras to internal only 

if you use online booking you may have extras that you only want to sell in-store, not online. Like insurance perhaps.

You can set these items to internal only:

Setting the order of Extras in online booking

If you wish to change the order that your extras are listed in online booking, then set a value in the order column. 1 means first in the list, 2 second and so on. If you don't set an order, then it will be random.

see also: customising text fields