Home → Arctic Reservations → Guide Management → Creating Guides
27.1. Creating Guides
Guides are one of the most important business resources you have. It is important to know what certifications and/or qualifications your guides have, when each of them is available and how many guides you need for a given trip. Arctic now offers great tools for managing each of these needs. In this chapter we will discuss each of the tools available to help you manage your guides.
The first step in guide management is keeping track of your guides' personal contact information as well as pertinent employee information and experience certifications and training. To do this you can create a "Guide" Person record in the People database. Arctic also gives you the ability to create the fields you need to help you track any additional information. This is done by using the built-in "Guide" form. To get to the "Guide" form, go to the "Settings" page under "Forms" and click the "Pencil" icon next to "Manage Built-In Forms". On the "Browse Arctic Forms" page, click the "Pencil" icon next to "Guide" to open the "Guide" form.
By default the only field that is automatically added to the "Guide" form is "Scheduling Notes". You can add any fields that you need, such as guide certifications, date of hire, emergency contacts, etc. (For more information about creating custom fields, see section 3.2 of the Forms Editor.)
Once you have added the fields you need to the "Guide Form", you are ready to start adding guides to your person database. To create a guide record, go to the "People" menu and choose "Create". On the "Create Person" page, click the "Edit" icon next to "Customer" in the "Type" field and then choose "Guide".
Once you have selected "Guide" as the "Type", in addition to being able to enter basic contact information, Arctic will also add the "Guide" form with all of your custom fields to the bottom of the "Create Person" page so you can complete these fields for the guide you are adding to your database.
Notice, the "Start Date" field. By default Arctic enters today's date for this field when creating a new guide, however, you can enter any date in the past or future. If you are entering a guide before they will officially start working with you then you should enter the date when they will officially start. If you are entering a guide who was hired previously and you are just getting them entered into the system you should enter the date they started with you even though it is in the past. Arctic uses this date to manage the guide's available for scheduling. Making sure you enter the correct start date will ensure that you can schedule the guide for the appropriate trips whether you are doing so retroactively or building your upcoming schedule.
Once you have completed the "Create Person" page including all of your custom "Guide" form fields, click "Submit" to add your guide to the database.
Arctic has a quick filter on the "Browse People" page that allows you to quickly pull a complete list of all of the guides you have entered in the system.