Asset Booking is now available with Helm!
You will now be able to book assets and rooms – not just event tickets. There are many uses for this feature, including room booking, hot desking, booking out office space, sports halls or event assets such as equipment or even people!
Here is a quick rundown on the new feature: what it is and how it can help you.
Why use Asset Booking?
Asset booking enables users to be able to book and organise more than just events. It will allow users to book any ‘asset’ – whether it be a room, a physical piece of equipment or an hour of someone’s time.
For example, Asset Booking would be used well for booking stands at conferences.
How does Asset Booking work?
The asset booking feature allows customers to book out any asset for a fee, dependent on how long the asset is used.
An organiser can use the asset booking feature to book:
- Buildings
- Meeting rooms
- Hot desks
- Conference rooms
- Equipment
- Or anything else that needs a booking system
As this feature is built on top of our event ticketing platform (although there are a few differences, such as pricing structure), all other functionality you get from our ticketing platform will work with the asset booking functionality.
This means that the owner of the assets available to book can:
- Refund and cancel orders
- Embed their asset booking page into their own website using a widget
- See the list of people who have rented the asset in a convenient CSV
- Manage orders
- Accept payments by invoice
- Apply discount codes
- Include memberships
The asset management button can be found in the “Utilities” menu in the left-hand sidebar from the dashboard. Then use the “Create New Asset” button to begin.
When creating an asset booking page, the experience will be very similar to creating an event but with some notable differences:
- Some options are missing – you can’t set the event category, use tickets or use the reserve/waiting list.
- You can set the “type” of available asset, which will change the wording when the asset is referenced.
When setting the dates that the asset is available, you can add dates in bulk by clicking “add time slots in bulk” under the date entry fields. This is a new feature to make adding time slots and dates easier and more efficient.
When creating the asset booking, the venue search can be used as it would when creating an event, along with adding a description.
There is a “payment options” section to allow customers to pay by invoice or not. Please get in touch with our support team if you wish to have Pay By Invoice added to your asset booking.
Unlike our event platform, where the pricing is based on tickets, the pricing is set by the amount of time being booked in, and how much it will cost is specified by the asset’s owner.
For example:
- A 30-minute time slot will be charged £6
- A 1-hour time slot will be charged for £10
This is how the prices can be set when an asset is booked for a time slot.
When a customer places a booking for a specified time slot, the price is calculated to give the customer the cheapest possible rate for longer amounts of time.
As an example using the rates above:
A 2.5 hour time slot will be calculated as (2 x 1 hour) + (1 x 30-minute) slot = £25 rather than 5 x 30-minute slots = £30.
Please note that the paid rates are subject to a booking fee that will be worked out using the same pricing structure as our fees on tickets.
At the end of the asset creation page, images can be added along with any terms and conditions, privacy policies and refund policies.
When a customer is booking a time slot, they will see all available time slots throughout the date parameters that they have set and then continue to select the time slots they wish to book.
Once a customer is happy with their selection and clicks “checkout”, they will continue through the purchasing process as if buying a ticket. However, they will not be asked to provide a “ticket holder name” for each time slot booked if more than 1 is selected.
How does it affect you (the planner)?
As previously mentioned, this feature would be handy if you run events like conferences or trade shows where stands can be booked out for certain lengths of time and still needing to sell visitor tickets.
The uses for this are huge and can be used depending on your needs. Examples being room booking, hot desking, booking out office space, sports halls or event assets such as equipment or even people.
Our goal is to make your life easier as an organiser: we aim to build these features to get you selling tickets for your events as soon as possible and as smoothly as possible.
So this a brief guide on how to use our new Asset Booking feature and why it would be useful to you as an organiser!
For more advice on features both new and old, check out our help desk.
