Have been asked to see if Samba is a viable option for a local garage who also offers car rental.
They offer regular rental but also manage a taxi hub/rent cars to self employed drivers and charge a fixed monthly rate for car hire.
The garage side is easy, they do MOT/repairs etc which will just be product list using customers.
There main concern is keeping on top of the rented taxi cars as payments come in sporadically (presumably depending on how good business has been for the driver).
Am thinking of trying to use product timer on a 28day rate charged daily.
Have got the basics of that part sorted.
My thought to keep the rental going after a payment is made to use the ‘move order’ action under a header of say Pay Item which will add a new ‘Car Rental Product’ (fresh timmer) to the order befor moving the selected rental order item (old timer) is moved to a new ticket for payment which can then be closed.
Does that make sense?
Anyone see any issues with that in the long run?
It will mean the original ticket stays open for the length of the rental time but when they pay their balance the payment will be processed and closed in a separate ticket.
We have access to time and date. You would use an expression to calculate. Allowing tickets to close and WP to close. Maybe use states for rental calculate Time from state change. IT would work like our Time clock implementation using state logs.
The ideal solution would be to utilise accounts allowing payments to be made of any amount beyond current balance to be put in credit, but less familier with accounts settings, time to learn I guess LOL
Would not be sure how to charge a recurring amount to an account, might be asking a bit much of POS software to do subscription type charging…
Perhaps something based on a monthly trigger…
Tinkering with accounts, an account payment doesnt show of work period report, is that right or do I need to change something?
You can auto add funds to an account using the Create Account Transaction and or Create Account Transaction Document actions and then using them in an event of choice.
Study Entity State Logging and how it was used in the time clock tutorials. I think this might be ideal for a rental business.
Am still thinking about the recurring charge options.
Haven’t been all the way through the time clock setup but when you say about;
How would you automate this? I mean they have many cars and ideally dont want to have to go into each entity to trigger any automated charges.
Your time clock would have user interaction to give events to base rules on, is there an event or way to do an automatic run through?
Say if I set an entity state for CarStatus with Used and Unused a way to loop through the entities with ‘Used’ CarStatus to see if the time from state change is 28 days and if so create a ticket, add order ‘car rental’ (which I have setup a rule for when its added the price is updated to a value set in ‘Rental Price’ field in car entity) and then charge that ticket to the customer account.
Just looking at looped value, on a post of @emre maybe could setup a ticket lister widget to show all cars in use and use that. But would need to set an open ticket for each car in use/customer combination for that.
Would be nice to have an rule event for product timer - ie you could trigger actions when a timer reaches a certain time.
