Hallmaster Setup & User Guide

 

This guide assumes you have completed the Hallmaster Setup Wizard, and have successfully created at least one customer and booking for your venue. If you have not yet completed these steps, then please refer to your Hallmaster dashboard to complete the setup wizard, and return to this guide when you are finished.  

This guide will cover some further features and options in Hallmaster to tailor the system to your particular venue, and make the most out of using the software. 

The following items can be found in the Admin dropdown menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard.  

1.       Venue Settings

a.       Booking Form Settings – eg custom booking form fields, Terms and Conditions documents, booking conditions and restrictions

b.       Venue name and address

c.       Payment Integration settings (eg PayPal/Stripe) settings (if enabled)

2.       Rooms / Facilities – the hireable spaces in your venue

3.       Charges Matrix – Your price rates for the rooms setup above. These can be hourly or fixed rates. You can also setup conditional rates from this section.

4.       Activity Types – Optional grouping labels for your customer’s bookings, which you can use in the Reports menu to see a breakdown of the types of bookings that are most popular etc

5.       Line Item Groups – Optional extra items that can be added to bookings and invoices as additional charges/facilities such as deposits, refunds and incidental items etc

6.       Administrators – The users who have administrator access to your venue. Here you can configure their access roles and permissions.  

7.       Invoicing Settings (if invoicing module is enabled) – this is covered in the ‘Invoicing

Document’ guide

a.       Invoice logo and invoice reference numbers

b.       Invoicing Document themes and signatures (ie Invoices, Receipts, Statements &

Reminders)

c.       Tax Rates

d.       Accounting integration nominal codes (if enabled)

e.       Break points for Statements/Reminders

8.       Email Configuration

a.       Email Templates – customise the emails sent from the Hallmaster system to you and your customers

b.       Primary Emails – set the default email address that booking notifications are sent to instead of your venue admins (optional)

c.       Custom SMTP Settings – if preferred, you can configure the Hallmaster system to use your own SMTP Server to send emails, instead of our system server

9.       Audit Log – a log of all administrator activity in your venue

10.   Website Integration – provides various display panels and options for embedding or linking to Hallmaster from your website

11.   Heating/Access Integration (if enabled) – setup the connections from your Hallmaster calendar to a compatible heating/access control system.

1. Venue Settings

Booking Form Settings

Customer Addresses – If you require addresses from your customers to include on invoices and receipts etc, then tick the box for ‘Enable Customer Addresses’.  

 

Allow Guest Bookings – tick this box to allow your customers to book without setting up a password to login, this can be setup later if required.

 

Show All Rooms Option – tick this box to show the option to select All Rooms on your booking form.

 

Require Number of Attendees – Your venue may have restrictions or requirements for the number of attendees a booking might have – in this case, tick the box for ‘Require Number of Attendees’ to make this a required field on your booking forms, and move the field to a more prominent position on the page.  

 

Custom Fields – You can use this to add additional questions to your booking form, the available options are Checkbox, Yes/No, Text or Number fields. Select Edit to access this menu and click the Green plus sign to add your additional questions. You can hide these from the Public Booking Forms by selecting the tick box and you can also make these fields Required.  

 

 

 

Terms & Conditions – To add these to the booking form, add a custom field with the ‘URL Tickbox’ type and enter a link to the Terms & Conditions page or document on your website. When you enter the address here, it will automatically place this link on the booking form with a tick box. Set the custom field to be Required so that your customers need to tick before they can proceed and make a booking request. You can use the Title field to set how the document name will display on the booking form.  

 

Fixed Time Slots – If your venue has Fixed Time Slots, you can set these up here. Select the tick box alongside Fixed Time Slots and select Edit. Enter your slots available for each day of the week for your venue and select Save. These slots will then be visible on the customers booking form. An administrator will not be restricted by these settings.  

      

Booking Conditions – Here you can setup your booking conditions.

Enforce Room Closing Times will prevent customers booking outside of your opening times. You can also select various options for your booking durations such as Minimum/Maximum Booking Duration.

                 

Calendar Buffers – use this section to setup automatic buffers at the start/end of your bookings. These can be displayed either as extensions of the booking itself, or as separate items on the calendar for which you can also select the display colour using the provided colour picker. You can see an example of how this would look in the ‘Event Preview’ section. If you do not want these buffers to be added, then just leave this section as it is with the ‘Duration’ field set to 0

 

Payment Integration – If you have the PayPal or Stripe Integration Module enabled, enter your PayPal/Stripe email address here. This will automatically allow your customer to be able to pay their invoices directly into your account.  They will be able to make part or full payment of multiple invoices which you can verify before setting their Invoices to Paid etc. For more information go to the User Resources tab on your Dashboard, where you will find a document regarding ‘PayPal or Stripe integration’.

 

2. Rooms / Facilities

From this section you can View, Edit and Delete your existing rooms/facilities, as well as create new ones. You can re-order your rooms using the up and down arrows  

When editing or creating a room/facility, you will see the following fields:

•       Name – the name of the room/facility displayed to customers on your calendars and booking form.  

•       Description – an optional field to hold more information about the hireable space. This is displayed in the ‘Basic Webpage’ and ‘Scheduler’ display panels.  

•       Disable Public Bookings – Tick this box to prevent members of the public from requesting bookings in this room. They can still view availability from your public calendars.

•       Hide in Public Calendars – Tick this box to hide the room from the public altogether, so only administrators can view and create events for this room.  

•       Font Colour – The colour of text shown in the Schedular Display panel for events in this room

•       Background Colour – The colour of the background shown in the Schedular Display panel for events in this room

•       Room Heating & Room Access Devices (heating/access integration only) – Select which of your integration devices apply to this room – this is covered in more detail in the specific integration document for your system.  

•       Opening Times – Set the opening and closing days/times for this room. If you are using Fixed Time Slots, then this just sets which days the room is available to book  

The Bulk Edit option will allow you to set the ordering, colours and opening times for all of your rooms from a single page

Deleting a room will permanently remove that booking from your venue, and will also remove it from any bookings that used that room, which may leave some of your bookings without any room assigned to them.  

                 

3. Charges Matrix & Hire Charges

The Charges Matrix is a grid of your venue’s hire charges against each room, showing the cost of each rate in each room.  

 

You can update these by selecting Edit All Prices. You can enter/update the cost and name for each rate for this room. An Hourly rate, indicated by a clock will calculate the cost, times the duration of the booking, where a Fixed rate, indicated by a padlock will be a static cost regardless of booking duration. You can add further hire charges by selecting the green plus sign.

 

 

 

If a price rate changes throughout the day, for example if you have morning, afternoon and evening prices, then you can select the blue plus sign to enter an Until time.  

 

These prices will then be used to calculate the costs for your invoices.  

 

Hire Charges are linked in turn to your customers and more specifically to the activity they do (for example Jenny Smith runs a Yoga Class and has the Regular User Rate). You can also setup conditional rates which will automatically select the appropriate Hire Charge based on the booking details. For information on setting these up, please see the ‘Conditional Price Rates’ document and video.  

4. Activity Types

These are optional general headings for the type of events you have at your venue. E.g. Classes, Meetings, Party, Wedding etc.

 

You can enable the Activity Types you want to appear in the Customer’s Public Booking Form. This gives you the flexibility to just offer just the Activities you want.  All Activities are available to the Administrators.

 

Activity Types are only used for reporting, so you can see which types of events are booked most often, or bring in the most revenue etc. If you don’t need this level of detail for your reports, then just leave the default activity type ‘Venue Hire’ as it is, and the system will automatically skip this section for you. You can always add more types later on if needed.

5. Line Item Groups

Line Item Groups are optional collections of extra ‘Line Items’ and charges you can add to your bookings and invoices. This can include things like deposits, refunds, extra facilities such as kitchen equipment, tables and chairs etc.

The Line Items within a group each have their own cost, tax rate and name, as well as settings for whether they are visible in the public booking form, and whether they are required items (meaning the customer will need to select them in order to continue with their booking request).

Some of your items may be tax exempt or require different tax rates to be applied. You can set this using the ‘Tax Rate’ dropdown. If your venue is not VAT rated then you can just leave this dropdown at the default ‘No Tax 0%’ value.  

6. Administrators

Hallmaster allows for multiple administrators to access your venue at once, each with their own set of permissions and roles. Enter their first name, last name and email address. If this administrator is also a customer of your venue, you can add their activities and rates here once you have set those up.

In the Roles section, tick the boxes for the permissions this user should have. Each role is explained in more detail in the tooltips.  

You can then press Save to create this administrator profile. The Save and Email Password button will create this administrator and email them a link they can use to setup a password and login for the first time.

For more detailed instructions on managing your users, please see the User Management documentation.

 

7. Invoicing Settings

The Invoicing Settings menu allows you to setup various invoice specific details for your venue. This is covered in more detail in the Invoicing Document available from your Dashboard.

                 

8. Email Configuration

The Email Configuration menu contains a set of tabs with all the email templates that will be sent out from Hallmaster. We have entered default content to each email, but all of these templates are fully customisable so you can tailor them to suit your venue’s design style and change the text to your own personal messages.  

Each template has a set of Macros, which are effectively placeholder tags that will be replaced with relevant data when the email is sent – for example [User_First_Name] will be replaced with the first name of the email recipient – similar to how a Mail Merge function would work.  

You can use the ‘Send an example copy’ button to receive a preview email of the template you have created, and then press Save when you are happy. If you want to reset the template back to the default content, use the red ‘Reset to Default’ button – this will prompt you to confirm before changes are saved, so don’t worry if you press this accidentally!

More detailed instructions on how to use this section are available in the Instructions tab.  

By default, all booking and invoicing emails are sent to the relevant customer and any administrators with the matching role assigned, provided their email is verified* (IE Booking request and confirmation emails are sent to administrators with the Booking role assigned, and Invoice emails are sent to administrators with the Invoicing role assigned). Archived administrators will not receive any booking or invoicing emails.

Alternatively, you can setup primary Booking and Invoicing email addresses which will receive these messages instead of the administrators. These are added in the ‘Primary Emails’ tab of this page. This can also be used for managing automatic email forwarding from your own email service.

There is then the option to enter your own SMTP Server details. This will allow the Hallmaster system to connect to your own SMTP server to send emails, instead of using the Hallmaster email server.

This in turn means emails will be sent from your own email address instead of

‘[email protected]’ and allows you to bypass email verification altogether if preferred.  

* For more information in email verification please see the ‘email verification’ section of the User Management guide.

 

9. Audit Log

This section logs all Administrator activity in your venue, showing each action taken along with then it occurred, and which user made that action. You can filter this grid to find specific items in the same way as the other grids in the Hallmaster system.  

                 

10. Website Integration

This section provides the various display panels and calendars available in Hallmaster. Each panel can work as a standalone web page, or embedded in your own website.