Campground Master - Release 1.1

Campground Master Version 1.2 Release Notes

This version contains a number of small enhancements and a few bug-fixes. We recommend upgrading to this version to take advantage of the enhancements and eliminate the bugs. These release notes have been divided into 3 sections, listing the changes since version 1.1.1.

Changes to be aware of -- things that might affect what you're used to seeing or how you do things.

Additional Features -- the most prominent feature additions to this version.

Other minor enhancements -- small changes or additions to the program, and bugs fixed.

Note: While there should be no problems with the new version, be aware that you cannot go back to using a version of Campground Master prior to version 1.1 once you start using this version, due to upgrades that are automatically made to the database. Be sure you make a backup of the database before installing the new version, in case you have any trouble.

Also Note : When you install the new version, the "demo" database (demo.prk) will be overwritten with a new version of the sample database. If you have been working with the sample database and want to save the changes you’ve made, then you need to load it and then use File | Save As to save it to a different name before installing the new version of the software.

Changes To Be Aware Of:

Where the labels "First Night" and "Last Night" appear on the receipts and reports, now the name of the corresponding Reservation Field is used (so they could be changed, for instance to "First Day" and "Last Day"). Unless you have changed these field names manually, you shouldn't see any difference.

If your screen's resolution will allow it, the Transactions tab now has 2 separate "Options" buttons -- one for Summary Options and one for Detail Options. Therefore you don't need to check "Summarize" before getting to the summary options. If the resolution is not high enough (not enough room), then a single button is used but it will indicate whether it's for detail or summary options (and will change when "Summarize" is checked or unchecked).

Some of the tab views have a new option to Include unoccupied sites in the list when the list is sorted by Site. This option is found in the "Options" on the appropriate tab view, and is turned on by default. The On Site tab view is the most affected, since it's normally sorted by Site, and it defaults to including unoccupied sites. While this is handy for walk-around site checks, you may want to turn this off to shorten the list.

Because it was easy to accidentally enter a Customer Transaction to pay a rental balance, which should be a Reservation Transaction, more warnings were added if a customer transaction is attempted (but it can still be done if needed). In addition, Reservation and Customer detail dialogs will show both Customer Balance and Reservation Balance amounts, as well as the reservation quick-info pop-up (if a customer balance exists which is different than the reservation balance). Also the Payments Due tab can show customer balances and can be generated based on customer balance instead of reservation balance if necessary (see the Options on the Payments Due tab).

The "Intended Nights" field has been removed from the Reservation Details dialog. Instead, it shows the actual Number of Nights, and will change if the dates are changed.

The Unassigned and Non-Reserved tab views will show all reservations that include any part of the date range selected, rather than only those which start in the selected range. This can be changed back to Start date in the "Options" on the respective tabs.

The pop-up information labels, such as the full customer names, site names, and dates on the Rack, will disappear after a few seconds. They will re-appear if you move the mouse slightly.

Refund transactions should now be entered as positive values, not negative. The negative entry was found to be confusing. This will not affect previous transactions (the database is automatically corrected when loaded). Refunds are also now shown in the "Payments" section on statements, rather than the "credits" section.

Credit transactions have been moved from the "Receipts by Payment Method" Quick-report (where they never showed up anyway) to the "Charges by Category" Quick-report, since they don't have payment methods but they do have categories and are treated like charges & discounts. To further clarify this, the "Other Credit" transaction button has been moved up to the Charges/Discounts button group. Also, when entering Credit transactions, the description is automatically set to the category selected, to speed entry.

Additional Features:

Weekday-specific reservations -- The ability has been added to make a reservation apply to only specific days of the week (for instance, every Wednesday). This is a special-purpose function used to reduce the number of separate reservations needed in situations where it's common to have different people reserve the same space but on different days of each week, over a long period (for instance, for flea market table rentals.) To enable this feature, the appropriate "weekday" Reservation Fields must be enabled. We recommend that you don't enable these fields unless needed, since it does use more space and can slow down the displays.

The contents of any of report can be copied to the clipboard, so it can be pasted into a spreadsheet like Excel or any text document. To use this, just select the desired "cells" on the report with the mouse and press Ctrl-C to copy. Then switch to your spreadsheet or other program and use Ctrl-V to paste the data.

An "Export current view..." function has been added to the File menu. This allows any of the tab views to be completely exported to a text file ("CSV" format), which can be imported to Excel or other spreadsheet applications. This function on the File menu can be used for any of the tab views, but any of the other dialogs with grid-type reports (for instance, Find Reservation) can also be exported by clicking the "Export list" button on the dialog (or by pressing Ctrl-F10 when the dialog is open).

Rate Selection -- the default number of days (or other period) automatically takes into account the paid-through date, and also any previously selected rates during the same Select Rate(s) dialog session. So for instance, for a 16-day reservation that has already been Paid Through the first week, it will show 9 days unpaid (this shows at the bottom of the Rate Selection dialog). If you then Add a weekly rate it will assume 1 week. Then when you select a daily rate to complete the charges, it will assume only 2 days at the daily rate. This also works for reversing charges -- if a reservation is checked out and its paid-through date is 2 days later than the last night, selecting the daily rate will correctly assume -2 days.

Unbound transactions can now be edited from the Transactions tab (right-click on the entry and select "Transactions"). Multiple unbound transactions entered in one session of the New Transactions dialog will "stick together" as one set, so they will be brought up together for editing just like reservation transactions.

The Find Customer dialog has new options to search by: "Discounts" and "Discount ID's".

When using the Find Customer or Find Reservation dialogs, pressing Alt-G will set keyboard focus to the grid (and select the first entry), so you can use the keyboard to select an item instead of the mouse.

A "default number of receipt copies" option has been added under View, Options, Printing. This allows you to make it always default to printing 2 copies of the receipts. (The number of copies can be still changed when printing if needed.)

Other Minor Enhancements:

An icon/button has been added for the "Search Grid" function (previously only available through Alt-S), and will be next to the Print button. F9 can also be used (in addition to Alt-S).

Two new Reservation Receipt formats have been added -- the Ticket Forms can now have the Site and First/Last nights on the left-hand side. This can be more convenient for placing folded receipts in a wall-board slot, or could be better suited for window-tags.

Some speed improvements have been made so the reports are displayed quicker.

An option has been added to automatically check "Show Available" when a new reservation is being made.

The auto-find functionality has been implemented on the Customer Details dialog so it works like the New Reservation dialog -- if you enter a Last Name (or partial name) and do Find Customer, it will automatically search for that name. (This assumes you enter a name on a "blank" customer record, such as when you first enter the Customer Details through the icon button or "Add New Customer".)

The On Site, Arrivals, Departures and Unassigned tabs now have an option for whether to show Wait-listed reservations or not (previously they would always show wait-listed reservations, which isn't always appropriate).

When the mouse is moved over a date in the tab view reports, the full date is shown (including the day of the week and the year), unless the shown format already includes the full date. Therefore a shorter format can be used on the report (through View | Options | Program) and the full information is still available by simply moving the mouse over the date.

The Reservation Status (Pending, Confirmed, Checked In, etc.) can now be shown as a field on most of the tab views (see the "Options" for each tab view).

The "No Site: xx" indicators for unassigned reservations on the Rack can now be turned off -- see View | Options | Rack to enable/disable these indicators.

If a reservation has the "Don't Move" flag set, previously the "Assign or Change Site" functions were disabled for the reservation. Now they are enabled, but an error message will be shown if it's attempted, and will explain what you need to do (uncheck the "Don't Move" flag).

Previously the New Transactions dialog would set the Payment Method for all Payment-type transactions to whatever the Payment Method was set to at the end (after all transactions are added). Now when adding payment-type transactions, the currently selected Payment Method will be used and remembered for the payment. Therefore, you can make multiple payments of different types in one session -- for instance, set the Payment Method to "coupon", enter a Payment transaction, then change the Payment Method to "cash" and enter another payment transaction for the remainder. It will retain the correct method for each transaction so reporting is accurate. (Note: any payment transactions that are entered before a Payment Method is selected will still be set to the last Payment Method selected.)

Several new options were added under View | Options | Prompts, to allow you to specify when the Transactions dialog is shown automatically (for instance, when checking in, checking out, canceling, etc.)

The number of nights and the rig model/color have been added to the reservation quick-info pop-up.

If a report takes some time to display, an hourglass-cursor is shown so you know it's working on it.

If a customer has the "Warning Flag" selected, then the warning icon will show on the Customer Details and Reservation Details.

A separate View | Options | Printing option has been added for "always preview receipts", so previewing receipts can be turned off while still allowing previewing of reports before printing.

The New Reservations dialog was fixed so the number of nights isn't reset to 1 when a site is selected.

If a reservation is checked out, changes to the First Night and Last Night dates are prevented. Likewise, changes to the First Night are prevented once a reservation is checked in.

Leading and trailing spaces are trimmed from all text fields after entry, to avoid accidental blank space (which affects sorting and Find functions). To help find previous entries with leading spaces, the Find functions have been changed to ignore it.

Fixed a problem with negative transaction quantities not calculating the total correctly.

Fixed Transaction notes so that any previously entered notes are shown, and any new notes are copied to all transactions.

Fixed Transaction dialog so the notes and date changes aren't reset after selecting a rate or discount/payment method.

Fixed so function keys are not disabled when a pop-up tip is being displayed.

Fixed printer settings so they're saved/loaded correctly.

A bug was fixed that caused all of the reservation dates to shift if the time zone was changed on the computer.

Some display issues with "large fonts" have been resolved (dates, etc. being cut off).