Managing Reservations and Building Orders

If Reservations are enabled, users can setup reservations for items. Multiple users can reserve the same item for the same time if neither of the reservations are "approved". Potential conflicts will be displayed in the Reservation List (see below), and you can edit reservations and commnicate with users about their reservation. 

When you have reservations enabled, your users can (when logged in) browse inventory and add items to their "cart". They can click on one or more items to add them to their cart, and during "check out" can adjust the quantities of the items needed.

Enable reservations:

1. Go to Settings -> Loans & Reservations
2. Check off "Enable Reservations"
3. You can also have non-conflicting reservations be "automatically approved" by checking off that options. This means you will not need to approve the reservation before the items are blocked form being added to other reservations.
4. Click "Save" 

Manage Reservations:

1. Go to Inventory -> List Reservations
2. You will see the reservations that start today or in the future and will be able to page to newer and older (using the [<<] button) reservations
   • Today button: show reservations today forward
   • Tomorrow button: show reservations tomorrow and forward (useful if you use the Build Order process to get reservations pulled from inventory and ready to go in advance)
3. You can Approve, Deny, or Build Order for reservations. Under More Actions, you can also Edit, Change the User the reservation is for, or Send a Message to the user for each reservation.
4. If the user specified a "note" when they setup the reservation, that note will appear in the list
   • You can also add an admin-only note under More Actions
5. When you approve a reservation (if it is not automatically approved), users will not be able to reserve that item for the days of the approved reservation.

If reservations conflict or potentially conflict, you will be warned about those conflicts in the list. The Reservation ID of the conflicting reservation(s) will be listed. Reservation ID's are assigned in numeric order, so the reservation made first will have a lower Reservation ID#.

Building Orders

You can also set items aside from a reservation in advance by building an order from a reservation.

1. Click "Build Order" for the reservation
2. Scan, enter or click on the items you want to add to the order as you put them aside
   • Note that you can add any "grouped" item and do not need to find the exact copy of the item and the one on the reservation will be swapped with the one you entered which will end up on the order. See Swapping below.
3. Items added to the order will not be available to be reserved from "now" till the end of the reservation
4. When the user comes to pick up their items, you can click "Check Out" to add them all to the check out page at once.

Note: once you "Build Order" you may not be able to "Change User" for that reservation and users will not be able edit that reservation (if you have the option enabled to allow them to edit their reservations after they are submitted).

Swapping Items

Items in the same Grouping can be used interchangeably with other items in the same grouping. For example, if you have multiple Ice Cream Makers (12 in this case):

And someone reserves one and Item ID 307 happens to end up on the reservation, you can enter the Item ID of any copy, 205 in this case, of Ice Cream Maker to add to the order:

Then the specific copy you pulled from storage to set aside for the user will be added to the Order, swapping it for the one that happened to be on the reservation:

This way, you can grab any copy of the item and do not have to find the specific one that was requested.

In fact, this type of swapping of items is done behind the scenes if for example an admin does an ad-hoc check out for a copy that happens to be on a reservation. The admin will not be warned the item is already reserved if myTurn can swap for a different item in the grouping.

Currently, if you want people to be able to select a specific copy of an item and not have it ever swap, you must make sure your items are not grouped (the easiest way is to use different "names" for each item).