If you are using the booking calendar and charging members for booking resources (like rooms, equipment, projectors), this section allows you to include a certain number of hours of usage for free - i.e. Booking Credits with a membership plan.

For example, a full-time member might get 10 hours of meeting room usage for free. After the 10 hours are used up, you can choose to offer a discounted rate for members with this plan or leave the price/h blank to have the regular fees apply (as populated within the Resources Settings).

You can also add a monetary amount that members can apply to one, or multiple resources.

These expire/refill to that amount at the conclusion of each monthly billing cycle.

This feature has been discontinued. If you are not seeing it in your plan settings, check out External Bookings or member specific resource access instead.

If you are seeing Prepaid booking passes in your plan settings, then you can still use them. Keep reading to learn more on how these work.

When a member books a resource in the booking calendar, they are charged for it with their next invoice. With Prepaid Booking Passes you can make people prepay for bookings, which is ideal for non-members who just want to use a meeting room or drop-ins whom you might never see again.

When activated, the member has to buy (and immediately pay for) a Prepaid Booking Pass. Each pass holds a number of hours set by you and can be valid for single or multiple rooms. If you offer an hour-long pass, for example, your members can make bookings in smaller time increments until they have used up the pass entirely. That means a booking pass of one hour can be used not only to make an hour-long booking, but also two 30-minute bookings, four 15-minute bookings, or six 10-minute bookings. The smallest increment of time supported by our booking calendar is 5 minutes.

You can combine booking credits and Prepaid Booking Passes by including both in a plan. When a member makes a booking, their booking credits will be used first. When they have run out of credits, they will be prompted to buy Prepaid Booking Passes.

The member must be connected to their member portal and have an automated payment method registered such as a credit or debit card in order to purchase passes.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

To set up booking passes, go to Setup » Plans and either add a new plan or edit an existing one. Now go to the Bookings tab.

Click 'Add Booking Passes' andenter the price for one pass, the amount of time for which the pass is valid (you can use decimal points here to indicate spans less than one hour), and the resources it is valid for.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

There are two ways for members to get booking passes: Buy them through Cobot or have an admin assign them.

For this to work, your space must have set up either Paypal or card payments, otherwise there is no way for them to immediately pay for the passes.

Members whose plan includes booking passes will have a Buy Booking Passes button on their home page. If no payment method is on their account, they will be prompted to add one prior to purchasing passes. This ensures you receive payment prior to any bookings.

An invoice will be generated, marked as 'Already Paid' and be immediately posted to their account once a pass has been successfully purchased. No payment records are recored on the invoice because technically, the process has already been completed.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Prepaid booking passes DO NOT expire. The member will have access to them until they have used them, or you have manually removed them from their account.

If you would like to assign passes to a member, you can do so by clicking on their name in the member list.

After that, open the drop-down menu in the Bookings box and select Assign Booking Passes. Their plan needs to have prepaid passes setup for this option to be available.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When you manually add passes, the member will not be automatically charged for them as they would when they purchase them from their member portal, nor will they appear on a future invoice. If you would like to charge your member for the passes you have assigned, you can either add a One-time Charge for it to their next invoice or create a separate free-form invoice for the charge.

When making a booking, members will see how many hours they have left. If you make a booking for a member, you will see the same information. If they are out of passes, then this message will appear with a link back to their dashboard to purchase more passes:

At the end of the month, members who have bought booking passes will get an invoice that lists the booking passes as already paid so they have a receipt of their purchase. If you want them to get the invoice immediately, you can generate a charge-based invoice.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If they attempt the cancel the booking within that time frame, 24 hours for example, they will be unable to and will not receive a refund or credit on their account for the pass applied to that booking. They will need to either use another, existing pass, or purchase more passes to make another booking.

Here is an example of the screen the member would see when attempting to cancel:

Now let's see how to make bookings in the booking calendar.