Managing Your Room Information

Angelfish B&B Manager provides a comprehensive set of features for managing your rooms, including the ability to specify both Bed & Breakfast and Self-Catering rooms, to upload room information to your own web availability calendar, and a pricing model that allows you to specify a range of supplements in addition to the basic prices.

Viewing Your Rooms

You can view all the rooms in the system by clicking on the Rooms button on the toolbar, or by selecting Rooms & Facilities > View Rooms from the menu. This displays the Rooms screen, from where you can add a room, remove rooms or edit room details, including the pricing.

Adding a Room

To add a room, click on the Add button in the toolbar at the top of the Rooms screen. This shows the Room Details screen, into which you can add the following information for the room.

The name of the room, room type (single, double, etc.) and the normal adult occupancy. Note that you can also set a value for "Our Name" which can be the informal name you refer to the room by. Any published room information (e.g. your web calendar) will use the Room Name, whereas the diary, calendar and other B&B Manager screens will use "Our Name". If you leave "Our Name" blank, the Room Name will be used everywhere.
Whether the room is used for bed & breakfast or self-catering. Note that the self-catering option can be used for separate buildings/apartments; you can specify the room type for these as "Family" and set the normal occupancy accordingly.
Whether or not the room is available online. This determines whether or not the room is published to your web availability calendar.
The facilities included in the room. If you want to be able to add extra beds and/or cots to the room, please ensure that these options are ticked.
The colours used to represent bookings and closures in the B&B Manager Room Calendar
The pricing information for the room

Setting up Room Prices

Room prices are used to help B&B Manager estimate the cost of a new booking, although you are able to override the calculated price when making the room booking. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to enter your room prices in the room information as accurately as possible, and to create new price points when a change in your pricing occurs (e.g. as you move from Winter to Summer prices).

The room prices for the selected room are shown at the bottom of the Room Details screen. For each price point, you need to specify:

The start date from which the price takes effect
The price of the room based on normal occupancy, either per night or per person per night
For rooms with two or more bed spaces, the per night rate for single occupancy
The Friday/Saturday supplement, if you charge one. This will be calculated either per night or per person per night, depending on the price setting
The charge per extra bed, if you have specified that the room can accommodate extra beds
The charge per child bed, if you have specified that the room has child facilities (i.e. cots)

To update an existing price point, click on the price point in the list to highlight it, then set the price details as required and press Update Price. To add a new price point, enter the new price details and click on Add Price to add it to the list.

When estimating the price of a booking, B&B Manager will use the latest price point that starts on or before the first night of the booking. If the booking overlaps a new price point, B&B Manager will by default use the earlier price point to calculate the room price for each night of the booking. However, if you wish to ensure that each night of such bookings is priced according to the actual price point each night, you should select Hotel > Hotel Details then click on the Payment Details tab and ensure that the box marked Calculate Room Rates on a daily basis is ticked.

Changing Room Details

To change the details of a room, including adding or amending prices, click on the Rooms button on the toolbar or selct Rooms > View Rooms from the menu. Then either double-click the room you wish to change, or click on the room to highlight it then click the Edit button to display the Room Details screen. Now you can update the room details in the same way as when you added the room above.

Removing a Room

To remove a room, return to the Rooms screen and click on the room that you wish to remove. If the Delete button is enabled at this point, you can click on it to remove the room. If the Delete button remains disabled, this is because the room already has one or more bookings assigned to it, and removal of the room would also remove these bookings, compromising your accounts. If you still wish to remove the room, you will first need to remove the bookings associated with the room, by going to the Bookings screen.

A Note on Price Points

The idea of price points is to allow you to change the pricing rules for any or all of your rooms as and when your pricing structure changes. Typically, this would be seasonal (i.e. Winter/Spring/Summer) or perhaps just once a year for smaller B&B's that do not rely as much on seasonal tourism. So as you continue to use B&B Manager, you will build up, for each room, a history of price points. It is important that you maintain this history, by adding new price points when pricing changes occur and not simply updating existing room prices (unless of course you got the details wrong in the first place!).

There will be times when you break your pricing structure for particular guests, for example, by offering concessions or special promotional prices. Exceptions such as these are not generally worth creating a new price point for, because B&B Manager gives you other ways of applying concessions or special offers, outside of the price points. You should only create a price point if it will last for a reasonable amount of time (i.e. several weeks) and it will provide accurate estimates of costs for the majority of bookings. Otherwise, you will end up adding lots of price points, with each one only used for a few bookings.