Let us take a small restaurant for example, with a dining area containing various sized tables and a small hall for family festivities.

The restaurant will naturally have regular business hours; this can be changed, flexibly, for each weekday (Not as important for restaurants, but for doctors offices is the ability to distinguish between even and odd weeks very important.)

Entering the business hours is done in the administration area under Settings General Settings Business Hours.

You can now set the restaurant tables as resources in the booking system, e.g. "Table for two", "Table for four" etc. The value, Quantity corresponds to the amount of tables in the dining area. You may enter an additional price of 10 GBP for the hall, since this is the price to rent it for one hour. This way, you can create several rows of resources in chart form.

Each resource can be augmented with more details. Editing resources is very similar to editing products, e.g. the description , the pictures, as well as assigning a category. A distinct feature of resources( like with our restaurant table example), is the ability to have specific settings for reservations/bookings.

To name a few:

• Whether appointments are confirmed automatically or manually. For the tables at a restaurant, it should be automatic, the hall should be set to manual though, due to additional preparations and scheduling.
• A customer can define the duration. Customers can obviously choose a specific time (during business hours), when they want to make a reservation. The suggested duration is one hour.
• How far ahead of the appointment can the reservation be made or cancelled?

The hall can have the setting, that customers are able to pay the appointment, when the setting 'Price for 1 hour' is enabled.

With the tab Customer options, you can add additional options for customers to choose from, regarding the resource. In case of the restaurant, this could be utilized by implementing either window seats or more quiet seats in the back, or different table decorations. These options are uniquely defined through product types and can be used repeatedly afterwards.

Appointments can be made by the customers via the website or directly through the administration (e.g. through phone reservations). Depending on whether the E-mail event is enabled, the customer will receive an appointment confirmation via E-mail, which will contain a small file as an attachment, integrating the appointment in MS Outlook.

The administrative area contains an overview over all appointments, with the ability to edit (e.g. in case of re-scheduling), cancel or make new appointments and so forth.

You can search for confirmed appointments and can apply various filters to the results.

It is also possible to set appointments outside of the regular business hours. The hall, for example, could be booked exceeding the regular business hours for festivities. Changes in business hours, which only affect a certain time frame, can be set using the batch clearance function under Appointments. For example, if the restaurant is closed for two weeks due to renovation.

All-in-all: The thick reservation book behind the counter could we be reaching the end of its days and could be replaced by its softcopy counterpart, as an internet application. The owner of a restaurant could very well continue to take reservations personally over the phone. He can, however, offer additional reservation services online, since the potential customer, who gets to the restaurant's website via a search engine anyway, is more likely to make a reservation after being impressed by the ambiance of the restaurant, and the services and dishes offered online; a simple click on the link, "Reserve this Table" can be very helpful.