Home → Arctic Reservations → Add-ons → Adding Required Inventory
9.3. Adding Required Inventory
The Add-Ons Feature in Version 2 allows you to associate inventory constraints with your add-ons. Specifying the Required Inventory allows Arctic to help you keep track of how much equipment you have available for your guests and it will prevent making more reservations than you can support given your inventory availability. If you also share your Inventory Items with rental customers, Arctic will help you manage how many items you need between both your trip reservations and your rentals. This comes in handy, especially, when you have multiple trips that use the same item and you also rent the item on its own. Arctic will monitor all of the reservations for every trip that uses the item and all of the rentals for the item and keep you from over booking beyond the available inventory. You can also use the Required Inventory Feature for Permit constraints that may be placed on you by your local forrestry service for the number of guests, boats, horses, snowmobiles, etc that you can have in the forrest on any given day or at any given time. In this section we will discuss how to link inventory with some of the various add-ons we created in the previous section. This will give you a good overview of the flexibility this feature offers to help you manage your resources.
Remember to associate an add-on with an inventory item, you must first create the inventory item as a rental item. See the "Creating Rental Item Guide" for further instructions on how to create a rental item. If you have not already created the rental item that will be used as the invetory item for the add-on, you can click "Submit" to save your changes and go create the rental item. Once the rental item has been created, you can return to your trip type and pick up where you left off.
Note: Arctic generally allows for you to overbook trips via the backend so that you can judge if you can possibly take a few more guests; however, if the trip you are looking at has a "Required Inventory Item" associated with the add-on options the guest wants and you do not have the inventory to cover the options the guest wants, Arctic will not allow you to complete the reservation and will tell you that you do not have enough inventory to complete the reservation.
Since we left off with the "Required Add-on" incomplete in the last section, let's pick up our examples from there. Remember, it is only necessary to create "Required Add-Ons" if you have inventory constraints. To add the Required Inventory information to the "Required Add-On" click the blue "+ Add Required Inventory" link shown here:
This will open the Required Inventory Form as shown here:
In the last section, we created the "Required Add-On" for our Life Jackets because every guest needs to be assigned a jacket and they are included in the cost of our tour. Now we will enter the inventory constraint that goes with this add-on to complete its setup. First, in the "Inventory Item" field choose the "Rental Item" that is associated with your add-on, in this case, we will choose "Life Jackets".
The next field on the Required Inventory Form allows us to tell Arctic whether the item can be shared by more than one guest. Since we can't put more than one guest in a single life jacket, we will choose "This Item Is Not Shared". Next we will enter the numer of items that each guest needs. Since each guest can only wear one life jacket at a time we will enter 1 item per guest.
The next fields are the Allocation fields. Using these fields we can tell Arctic how long we will use this item.
The first Allocation field allows us to tell Arctic how long we want to use the item. If there is a 2 hour orientation before we need to pick up the life jacket for the trip you can enter 2 hours after the trip starts. If you have your guests pick up all of their gear 1 hour before their trip starts you can enter one hour and change the drop down from "After" to "Before" the trip starts.
The next set of options allow us to tell Arctic how long we need to get the item back into circulation before it can be used again. If you have a 2 day trip but it takes 2 hours before the guests return and get all of their gear checked in after the trip ends you will want to enter 2 hours "After" the trip ends in the "Allocate This Item Until" field.
If you need the item from the time the trip starts until the trip ends and do not need a recovery time you can leave all of the Allocation fields at 0 and Arctic will govern the item based on the trip start and duration. You can also fill out just one or the other of the fields depending on how your guest will use the item. For instance, if your guests go through an orientation before getting their gear and you don't need any additional time to get the item back into circulation again for the next set of guests, you can enter 1 hour after the trip starts for when the item will be picked up and leave the second field blank so that Arctic will put the item back in circulation as soon as the trip ends.
You would do the opposite, if you need to pick the item up right when the trip starts but it takes 30 minutes to get the item ready to be used again. You can leave the first Allocation field blank so that Arctic will allocate the item as soon as the trip starts and enter 30 minutes after the trip ends for the second Allocation field so that Arctic will keep the item checked out until you have gotten it back into circulation. Using the Allocation fields allows you to control down to the minute how long the inventory will be in use for this add-on.
For our Life Jacket allocation, our guest will get their life jackets right when the trip starts and it takes 2 hours to get the life jackets back into circulation after the trip ends. So we leave the first Allocation field set blank and enter 2 hours after the trip ends for the second Allocation field.
Our completed Required Inventory Form looks like this:
Now let's add some inventory constraints to the Boat Preference "Choice Set" add-ons we created. First, let's add the inventory constraints for the 4 Person Raft.
For the 4 Person Raft, our inventory item is the 4 Person Raft. The 4 Person Raft can be shared by more than one guest so we will choose "Multiple Guests Can Share This Item" for the Usage field. Our Required Inventory Form then changes to reflect this selection as shown here:
The first change is that instead of telling Arctic how many items for each guest, we are going to tell it how many guests per item. Since this is a 4 Person Raft, we will enter 4 in this field.
The next field is really important and adds another awesome tool for being able to manage your add-on inventory items. This field is the "Fully Allocate" field. You can tell Arctic whether your guests must use this item fully or if they can partially fill it. For our 4 Person Raft, we allow less than 4 guests to use the item because we have plenty of 4 Person Rafts to spare. So, for the "Fully Allocate" field, we will choose "No, Can Have Less Guests Per Item". This will allow anywhere between 1 and 4 guests to share a single inventory item.
The "Share Across Reservations" field we can then tell Arctic whether the inventory can be shared across multiple reservations. If we want to ensure that only the people in a single reservation use the 4 Person Raft, we would set this feel as "No, do not share inventory item across multiple reservations". However, if we want to be sure to fill the boats to maximize our inventory we would select "Yes, share this item across multiple reservations". For our purposes we will select "Yes, share this item across multiple reservations" because we want to maximize the use of our inventory.
Next are the Allocation fields, we will leave the first set of fields blank because the guests will get their boats when the trip starts. For the second set of Allocation fields we will enter 2 hours after the trip ends because it takes us 2 hours to restage the boats to be ready for the next guests.
This completes the Required Inventory form for our 4 Person Raft.
Now for our river trip, we have a Permit that limits the number of boats we can take on the river to 20 boats per day. Since this Permit is associated with the number of Boats rather than the number of guests we are going to add an additional Required Inventory Item to our 4 Person Raft Add-on. This will allow Arctic to monitor not only the inventory of boats we have but also the number of boats we have on the river on any given day. To add the additional Required Inventory, click the blue "+Add Required Inventory" link as shown here:
This will open a second Required Inventory Form for the 4 Person Raft Add-on.
First, we will choose, our River Permit for the Inventory Item field. We will set the Usage and Guests per Item fields to be the same as what we set for the Rafts themselves. This will ensure that we will use the same number of units that the guest is selecting for the 4 Person Rafts for our Permit. The reason we are doing this is because our Permit constrains the number of boats not the number of guests. If the Permit constrained the number of guests we would be able to create the Permit as a "Required Add-on" for the trip added to each guest instead of adding it as an additional Required Inventory Item associated with our boat selections.
For the Allocations fields, we can leave these blank because our Permit only constrains the number of boats we can take on the water per day so the allocation only needs to be the duration of our trip because this trip is a 3 day trip. However, if the "Day" of the Permit is a 24 hour period running from midnight to midnight and your trip starts at noon and ends at 4 pm, you will need to enter 8 hours after the trip ends to be sure you don't overbook your Permit constraints. This would tell Arctic to keep the Permit spaces allocated until the "Day" expires. If your Permit only constrains the number of boats on the river at any given time you can leave the allocation fields blank and Arctic will only allocate the Boat Permits for the duration of the trip.
The completed Required Inventory Form for the Permit looks like this:
This makes the completed 4 Person Raft Add-on Required Inventory Forms look like this:
Notice the "X's" indicated by the arrows in the image above. If you want to remove an inventory constraint from an add-on just click the "x" in its box and Arctic will remove that constraint from your add-on.
Now, let's add the Required Inventory for our second boat selection. The Double Kayak is also shared by more than one guest but we require it to be fully allocated. It also takes us 2 hours after the trip ends to get the boats back into circulation For this our Required Inventory Form will look like this:
To complete the Double Kayak Add-on, we also need to add our Permit constraints. To do this, again, we will click the blue "+Add Required Inventory" link to add this second set of inventory constraints to the Double Kayak Add-on. Remember, since our Permit is linked to the number of boats we take, the Permit Usage and Guests per Item fields should match these fields for Double Kayak Required Inventory Form. Also, since our Permit constrains the number of boats we have on the river per day, our allocation fields will remain blank since this is a 3 day trip. The completed Permit Required Inventory Form looks like this:
This completes our Required Inventory Form for the Add-ons we created for this trip. We are ready to click "Submit" to save our changes. The above examples give you a good idea of how best to utilize the inventory feature for your needs and for the various scenarios you may encounter for your business. In the next section we will look at how our add-on setup looks via the backend and online for our guest facing sites when making a reservation.