Help

Getting started

Start on Sites & buildings: add every field, meadow, bunkhouse and barn that can be booked. Each one can have a name, a number, how many people it sleeps, its size, and the facilities on it. Then add your Customers — the groups, schools and families who book with you — and you can start taking bookings.

Sites and buildings

Fields and buildings live in one list because they behave the same way: each holds one group at a time, and each gets its own row on the calendar. The Number is the short one that goes on a booking sheet or a signpost (“F3”, “B1”); the name is the one a customer recognises.

Sleeps is used to warn you when a party looks bigger than the space you have recorded — it is a warning, never a refusal. A field that sleeps 60 in tents takes 70 for a day visit, and you know your own ground better than a number typed in two years ago.

When a field goes out of use, take it out of use rather than deleting it. It disappears from the booking form but keeps its history, and you can put it back later. Deleting is only offered when nothing has ever been booked on it.

Bookings, and what each status means

This is the part worth reading properly, because it is what stops two groups turning up at the same field.

• Enquiry — somebody has asked. It does not hold the dates. Two groups can have an enquiry in for the same weekend, which is exactly what happens in real life, and a system that refused the second one would lose you the booking.
• Provisional — held while they confirm. This blocks the dates just as firmly as a confirmed booking. Most bookings live here for weeks, and treating it as anything softer is how double-bookings happen.
• Confirmed — agreed and booked. Blocks the dates.
• Cancelled — kept as a record of what happened, and the dates go back on the calendar straight away.

While you are filling in a booking, Campsite Manager checks as you type and tells you if a field is already taken, by whom, and on which dates — so you find out while you are still on the phone rather than after you have told them it is booked. If it is taken you can still record it as an enquiry.

There is no way to force a double booking through. It is refused by the database itself, not just by the screen.

Arrival and departure days

A booking occupies the night it arrives but not the day it leaves. So a group arriving Friday and leaving Sunday has booked two nights, and another group can arrive that same Sunday on the same field. That is how a campsite actually runs, and it means your changeover weekends do not look like clashes.

The calendar

One row per field or building, one column per night. Read straight across a row to see whether that field is free — a stay that runs over a Sunday stays in one piece instead of being chopped in half the way a normal month calendar would.

A booking that started before the month you are looking at runs off the left edge rather than disappearing. Enquiries are shown with a dashed outline and can be hidden with the tick-box, so you can see just what is actually committed.

Customers

The Type — local group, visiting group, school, general public, or your own use — is recorded from the start even though pricing is not built yet. It costs one dropdown now and saves re-typing a year of bookings later.

A booking does not have to have a customer. Leave it blank for your own use — maintenance weekends, work parties, a site closure — and it will hold the dates exactly like any other booking.

Who can do what

• Leader and Helper can add and change sites, customers and bookings.
• Viewer can see the calendar and who is on site, but cannot change anything — the right role for a warden who only needs to know who is arriving on Friday.

What is not here yet

Pricing and invoicing, a public free/busy page customers can check themselves, a site map, activities with age ranges and instructor ratios, and the staff rota are all planned and none of them are built. If one of them is the thing you actually need, say so — it moves up the list.