The Angelfish B&B Manager Menu

The Angelfish B&B Manager menu has been designed to give you easy access to all the program features. The menu is divided into nine sections, and the most heavily-used features are duplicated on the graphical toolbar below the menu.

File

This menu is used for operations on the B&B Manager database. You can use this menu to create/restore database backups and to back up the database manaully to your own folder or storage device (select File > Save Database As). The database is a file called BBAccounts.mdb and we would recommend doing a manual backup on a weekly, or at least monthly, basis

Hotel

This menu gives you access to the hotel details (name, address, payment details and invoice/registration form layout) and also allows you to specify the payment methods that you accept. When setting up a payment method, you can optionally specify the commission that you are charged per transaction when using the payment method, and you can set up as many methods as you need in addition to the default methods provided. The commission is automatically added to your expenses by B&B Manager, so contributes towards your total expenses and becomes tax deductible.

Rooms & Facilities

This menu allows you to view and set up your rooms and facilities. Facilities can be used to add fixed price charges, such as laundry, evening meal, etc. You can also specify Special Offers (e.g. 10% off bookings between 3 and 7 nights between 1st March and 31st March) which you can then optionally apply to bookings that fall within these constraints. inally, you can view your current price points and reapply these price points at a future date.

Bookings & Closures

This section is used to add and review bookings, room closures and hotel closures, and gives you access to the New Booking Form, the list of Arrivals & Departures, the list of bookings and the graphical Bookings Calendar, which can now be printed and stuck to your noticeboard (or wherever). You also have access here to the Export Bookings feature, which copies all your bookings in a specified period to an Excel spreadsheet for you to download onto a Pocket PC or other Windows-compatible mobile device.

Guests

This menu can be used to view your existing guest list and to add details of new guests.

Accounts

This section contains all the accounting and reporting features in B&B Manager. First of all, you can set up new accounts (e.g. 2008/09) and review existing account details, including generating account summaries containing turnover, profit and expenses either monthly or quarterly. You can access the total deposits currently held for bookings who have not yet arrived, and set up different VAT rates for your business if you are VAT registered. This section is also where you access your statistics, showing financial and occupancy figures for selected periods. You have a choice of viewing full statistics or monthly booking value figures.

Expenses

This menu allows you to view and add business expenses and to set up expense categories (e.g. "Repairs", "Travel", "Advertising") to suit your own accounting model.

Website

This menu contains all B&B Manager's web-related features. These include the "Update Website" feature that keeps your own web calendar up to date and "Fetch Online Bookings" for those of you whose web calendars permit visitors to make provisional reservations. You can also use this menu to check for updates to B&B Manager and to link to the Angelfish Software members area. Please note that internet access is required to use all features in this menu.

Tools

This menu provides useful tools for assisting you when dealing with guests and bookings.

Help

This menu provides access product documentation, help files and the Quick Setup screen.