Finding your way around the Planyo backend

Video transcript:

This tutorial will let you get familiar with the layout of the planyo back end.

See the description under the video for links to the planyo documentation for each mentioned functionality.

Each planyo backend page includes common items, specifically on top of each page you'll find links to the planyo home page, to the integrations.

Click on my extensions to quickly access the back end of the extensions added to your site.

The contact link allows you to open a new support ticket.

My account is where you can edit the personal information of your planyo user.

The search field allows you to search through the planyo documentation as well as your reservations or customers.

More about this in the FAQ question Q229. The two green buttons on top of every backend page allow you to enter a new reservation as an administrator as well as quickly search for a reservation or a list of reservations.

In the top search section you can search for a reservation based on things like customer's name or email address, reservation ID, phone number or the value of a field in the reservation form.

Further filters are possible to narrow down the results.

For example enter arrival time and February 2020 to only search for specific reservations with the arrival date in February 2020.

The two bottom sections allow you to get a listing of all reservations entered within a specific date range or with arrival within specific date range.

This section will list all reservations without the possibility to search for a keyword.

In the search results you can apply further filters based on the reservation's color.

See FAQ question Q223 for more about this.

You can also filter by resource and reservation status.

At the bottom of the search results you'll find the button bulk manage items which allows you to quickly modify all listed reservations on a single page.

A wide number of modifications are possible such as switching reservations to a different resource, adding administrative notes, quickly changing the status of selected reservations, downloading multiple invoices in a single PDF, sending an email message to multiple customers and much more.

Each page of the back end includes the Blue menu on the left side of the page.

Dashboard is a convenient overview of the activity in your planyo site.

Use the filters on top of the page to narrow down the context used in the dashboard page.

At the very bottom of the page you'll find the edit dashboard button which lets you customize the components displayed here.

The reservations menu lets you see the detailed reservation listings such as the latest reservations entered into the system, upcoming arrivals, pending reservations meaning that an action is needed from your side in order to mark a reservation as confirmed.

Not completed are the reservations that are not yet valid and require the customer to perform further steps such as online payment in order to complete the reservation.

See the FAQ question Q169 for more about the reservation process and steps the customers take in order to enter their reservations.

The schedule page is the best place to see the activity of your resources on a calendar.

On top of the page you can narrow down to a single resource.

You can click on the calendar icon to quickly jump to a specific date.

The calendar views listed depend on the context: whether you're working with a single resource or the entire site and whether your resources are hour or day based. Most views allow you to drag and drop reservations in order to move them to a different date time or resource.

You can click on a reservation in order to make modifications.

Click on a vacation to quickly delete or modify it.

You can click drag the mouse across time units in order to enter a new reservation for the selected period or in order to block the selected period by adding a vacation.

See FAQ question Q119 for more information about resource vacations.

The availability page is where you can see how many units of a resource are still available for given time unit.

You can also quickly reduce the number of units available.

Internally this adds a resource vacation.

The customer list menu lists existing customers and lets you add new customers to the database.

Note that you don't need to add new customers in order to allow them to make reservations.

Whenever a reservation is entered with personal data of a new customer the customer record is created automatically.

In some cases such as memberships you may need to enter new customers manually or import them from a CSV.

See FAQ question Q144 for more about memberships and limited customer groups.

The subscription page gives you the details about your planyo subscription.

Here you will be able to see and download the invoices, see the breakdown of charges to your account and make a payment for your planyo site.

You'll find buttons for a single payment and buttons allowing Planyo to charge your card automatically so you don't need to worry about your account running out of funds.

Planyo is a prepaid service.

If you don't configure automatic credit card payments you'll need to make sure your account balance stays positive.

Note that whenever the balance goes down to or below zero you'll get an email notification and you'll have two weeks in order to make the payment.

The quick setup page is where you were redirected to after creating your Planyo site.

This is a place that allows you to enter a basic configuration of your planyo site and your resources.

Only simple configurations can be accomplished when using this page exclusively.

In most cases you'll need to go to the site settings and resources menu items.

Site settings is where you'll find a large number of detailed configuration pages.

General info is where you enter the general information describing your business. Active features is where you can switch on new features such as the shopping cart, the check-in and checkout functionality, cancellations and modifications done by the customer and a large number of other functionalities.

See FAQ questions listed in the video description for detailed documentation pages.

The online payments page is where you configure the online payments.

Note that you'll need to have your own account with one of the listed payment gateways.

The payments from your customers always go directly to your account never passing through Planyo.

Planyo will however receive information about the received payments in order to automate your processes usually by confirming reservations when a payment is received.

See FAQ question Q121 for more about the payment gateways integrated with Planyo.

Regional settings is where you configure your time zone date and time format, currency and so on.

Additional products are extras your customers can choose at the time of their reservation or at a later time.

These extras don't have an inventory.

If they do please see FAQ question Q262 about bundles and packages.

See FAQ question Q134 for more information about additional products.

Reservation form layout is where you design your reservation form.

It's possible to add a number of custom items such as text fields, drop downs, date or numeric fields, sections for each participant, obligatory agreement and many more item types.

See faq question Q142 for the details about this.

Email and SMS notifications is where you configure automated notifications sent to your customers and to your staff.

The notifications can be triggered by an event such as new reservation modification or cancellation or you can also configure notifications sent at a specific time, e.g.

one hour after entering the reservation or five days before arrival.

All notifications can include conditions so that they will only be sent for specific scenarios.

See the FAQ question Q123 and a dedicated tutorial for more instructions about the automated notifications.

Pricing manager is where you define the pricing of your resources.

This process is extremely flexible.

In Planyo there are over 70 different rule types which you can add to your pricing table in order to set or modify the price.

You can also add conditions so that the price is updated only when a number of conditions match e.g.

increase the price by X only for specific duration and during a specific season and when a form item is set to given value.

See FAQ question Q181 for more information about pricing manager.

Resource vacations is a detailed listing of all vacations entered into the system.

As mentioned previously vacations can be entered in a number of different ways such as on the schedule or availability page, directly on the resource vacations page, through our API or one of the extensions.

The filters on top of the page allow you to narrow down the listing of displayed vacations.

In seasonal settings you can define seasons used to change your pricing and also used to determine different time restrictions such as minimum stay, arrival weekdays, etc.

Vouchers and coupons is where you can configure vouchers, gift certificates and personal coupons based on an amount, number of entries, number of hours or validity during given number of months.

See FAQ question Q245 for more information about this.

Customized translation is where you translate your custom content to other languages and also where you can change the wording used in any text visible by your customers.

For example our default word resource may not well describe your offering and you may want to change it to something specific such as employee, car or seat.

See faq questions Q156 and Q157 for more about this.

CSS style editor is where you can customize the CSS styles used in your planyo site.

If you're a developer you can edit the CSS code directly or you can use the switch show simple visual style selector in order to quickly change fonts and colors.

Templates allow to you completely change the content of all pages displayed to your customers during the reservation process.

Custom resource properties allow you to add filters to your resources, for example your search box could include multiple locations or you may ask for the number of persons and only display compatible resources in the results.

You could also define GPS coordinates if you want to show your resources on a map.

See FAQ question Q154 for more about this.

The resources page lists your existing resources, allows you to quickly publish or unpublish a resource, and lets you add new resources to your site.

A full listing of configuration pages is available when you click on the more button.

Note that you can quickly switch to a different resource using the drop down at the top of each resource configuration page.

General info is where you enter the general information describing the resource.

Reservation process is where you configure the exact process your customers go through in order to enter their reservation into the system.

See FAQ question 169 for the different possibilities such as accepting online payments, verification of the email address, manual confirmation by the administrators, automatically confirmed reservations, hidden resources reservable only by the administrators, automatic cancellation and more.

Here you can also switch on the waiting list functionality.

See FAQ question 326 for more about this feature.

Time-related settings is where you define when your resource is available for reservation and what the rental duration will be.

It can be fixed chosen from a list of predefined choices or flexible.

You can also configure other restrictions such as minimal time between consecutive rentals and how early and how late reservation can be entered by your customers.

The images page is where you upload resource specific images.

Packages are virtual products visible by your customers.

They can internally use one or more base resources e.g.

a boat rental could reserve both a physical boat and an instructor, a floor reservation could reserve a number of individual rooms.

See FAQ question Q232 for more about packages.

Reports is where you can have planyo generate a number of different reports listing the activity of your planyo site.

The reports can be generated as a web page, a PDF document or a CSV spreadsheet exportable into Excel or other software.

Integrate with my website is the page you need to go to in order to integrate the booking process into your existing website.

There is a number of entry pages you can use such as resource listing or reservation form and a number of widgets which you can connect to the booking process such as a calendar preview, a search box, a map, a shopping cart icon and more.

At the bottom of the page you'll find the button integration settings which lets you define the domain name and location where you'll embed the reservation process on your website.

See FAQ question Q116 for more about this.

The scan QR code page is used together with the QR code printing tags which are normally sent to the customer by email or SMS.

These QR codes will allow the staff to scan the QR codes presented by the customers to check them in or quickly go to their reservation details page.

See FAQ question Q316 for more about this functionality. The message inbox is where you can control the messages sent between your staff and your customers in a single place.

Unread lists all customer messages not yet read by the staff.

Click on a message and either reply to it or click the button Mark as read in order to remove a message from the unread listing.

See FAQ question Q349 for more information about the messaging system used by Planyo.

Using planyo's messaging system has the advantage of making the conversation accessible to all administrators.

On each back end page there's a star next to the page title.

Clicking on the star marks a page is a favorite and adds a shortcut to the page directly in the blue menu on the left.

The help section is where you'll find planyo's technical documentation.

If you're only starting out with Planyo make sure you go through the other tutorial movies and text tutorials.

They go through the most important configuration tasks and integrating of Planyo with your website