Hire Car Booking System

Booking List

This shows the booking list with a number of bookings already entered. Typically, it shows the date, time, client, pickup and drop suburbs, driver, car and charge. The status column on the left shows things such as whether the driver has received the booking, the booking was cancelled or no job, the booking is due to be given out etc.

You can control which fields appear on the main list and in which order so you have the information most relevant to you available at a glance.

You can track outsourced bookings, related bookings. You have one click access to client details and driver assignment. Double click to modify the booking information.

Booking Properties

Enter all the information for the booking. You can also store useful things like the booking source, booking notes, internal/private notes, client order number, flight number/time. Choose from three different charging models, heaps of extras and driver royalty / commission.

You can assign drivers, outsource the booking, set the status, create or connect to related bookings, clone the booking and more.

You have one click access to the client information and previous bookings, charge account client list, client address history and Melway/Sydway databases.

There is a set of extra charges that will add to the total fare plus a set of extra charges that don't add to the fare. This is useful, for example, in the situation where some charge "fare plus GST" while others charge "fare including GST".

Preferences

Hire Car can be fully configured to meet your needs. The security option enforces user login and logs who enters the bookings.

You can set rules to charge by time, distance or flat rate, which can be overridden on a per booking basis. You can define your own 'extras' which can perform calculations if needed. If you charge by time, automatic fare calculation can be further refined by defining daily peak and offpeak times. Therefore a given booking will incur a different fare depending on both the day of the week and the time of day.

Users can set their own preferences to customise the look of the program including saving the desktop, automatically re-open windows or always open at today when starting, colours, toolbars, booking list columns and alarms. These settings are saved in the database so they're always available regardless of where you log in from on the network.

Statistical Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is key to making your life easy. It keeps track of journey information between suburbs and provides the means for automatically estimating the fare for new jobs.

If you charge by time, it stores the journey time between suburbs based on the day of the week and the time of day. The next time you enter a similar booking, the fare is automatically calculated.

If you charge by distance, the distance is stored and will be used next time to automatically calculate the fare for a similar booking.

If you charge by flat rate, the value will be retrieved and used for the next booking between the two suburbs.

Of course you can always override these calculations for a booking if it doesn't apply. It's no effort either way.

Reports

There's lots of reports at your disposal with plenty of options to fine tune the contents. You can filter booking reports on dates, clients, cars, drivers, charge accounts, status etc. Generate roster reports, invoices, account summaries etc.

You can send the booking reports to the printer or to the screen for further processing.

The template report system provides a mechanism for designing your own reports.

For a small additional cost you can get the web server which serves up HTML based reports over your local network using your favourite web browser.

Charts

The flexible charting tool helps you produce visual presentations for any period of time grouped into daily and monthly totals.

Choose flat or 3D style, line, bar, horizontal bar, pie, area and point styles with a number of presentation parameters available to adjust the look of the chart.

The chart can be copied to the clipboard ready to be inserted into your word processing document, spreadsheet or presentation.

Gantt Charts

The Gantt charting tool gives you a visual representation of a day or days' bookings. You can quickly see how the bookings are distributed among the cars; where a car is underworked, overworked and if a car is assigned bookings that are too close together.

The colour coding allows you to quickly identify allocated bookings, received bookings and overdue bookings.

It responds to data updates in real time so you can leave it on the screen as a monitor.

Backup Tool

The backup tool provides a quick and easy method to back up your valuable data that doesn't require a PhD.

Choose from standard file copy or zip compression modes. You can choose to backup to one or two distinct destinations for multiple redundancy. Save the configuration to make it a two click operation next time. Restoring a backup is just as easy.

The backup is named with the date for easy identification and historical purposes. You can configure Hire Car to automatically start the backup each time the application is shut down.

Tools Expert

The Tools Expert provides data export and import, controlled purging of bookings, clients and charge accounts, table analysis and repair tools and much more.

This stand-alone application provides the necessary tools to recover from database corruption caused by power failures, improper shutdowns, resets and other such catastrophes.

It also contains tools to import the Melway database, migrate to a different database system, export/import to comma delimited and tab delimited text files, pack your Paradox or Access database, set the Access database password plus much more.