Changeover days and minimum booking durations You can set minimum lengths for both weekend and midweek bookings, and set Five Star to only accept bookings that begin and/or end on certain days, so you can be certain that your policies will be adhered to, irrespective of whom you leave in charge while you are on holiday, or whether you accept bookings through your website. These policies can be varied by property, by season or both so that, for instance, you can divide your properties between Friday and Saturday changeovers, or accept short breaks in winter but not over Christmas.

Rate structures for self-catering inc. short breaks Because it has been designed specifically for self-catering, Five Star calculates the rates for short breaks by applying a percentage set by you of the weekly rate for that property in that period. Because you set these percentages independently for different combinations of weekdays and weekend days, you can charge, for example, 50% of the weekly rate for a two day midweek booking, 70% for a four day midweek booking and 65% for a two day weekend booking, as opposed to being restricted to a fixed per day rate. As above, these percentages can be varied according to the property, the season or both.

Deposits and balances Five Star gives warning reports when no money has been received for provisional bookings after a set number of days, and when bookings still have an unpaid balance a set number of days before the booking begins. You set the relevant length of time in both cases. You can of course override these settings and set different dates at the time of booking, or at any time thereafter. If you choose to accept bookings through your website, you also choose the percentage you require as a deposit.

Availability display, price quotation and booking through your website You can choose to take credit card payments online automatically, or download the credit card numbers via secure encryption and then process them manually in order to allow yourself to vet potential guests before you commit to the booking. If you do not take credit cards, you can quote for and receive bookings online, with the guest sending a cheque in the post.

Export of bookings, deposits and payments to accounts, spreadsheets or databases Depending on what you use for your accounts, you can export the data directly from Five Star to Sage, QuickBooks, MYOB, spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, or databases such as Microsoft Access. Five Star exports correctly for both VAT registered and non-VAT registered companies, and can work on a either a cash or an accrual accounting basis.

	Discounts for preferred guests You can give a guest a specific percentage discount. Then, whenever you make another booking for that guest, Five Star automatically calculates the amount and applies it (you can of course override this). If you choose to take bookings through your website, you can also choose to automatically apply these discounts to internet bookings as well.
	Customised correspondence on your own stationery Booking Confirmation Letters, Balance Acknowledgement Letters, Late Availability Emails etc. are created by merging the relevant details from Five Star straight into Microsoft Word documents that you create with your own text and layout.

That way, letters are all formatted to go with your stationery, and emails are addressed to the recipient's name (rather than "Dear Previous Guest") and list only each recipient's own email address at the top (as opposed to the email addresses of your entire mailing list). Best of all, this correspondence is created by clicking a couple of buttons, selecting the letter or email you want and then pressing either "print" or "send". All the tiresome details (name and address of guest, property booked, dates booked, booking cost, deposit amount, balance due date etc.) are added automatically.

Customised searches of Guest Records You can create your own customised searches of your guest database. For example you can create a search to return all the guest records with "USA" in their country heading, or you can mark all your guests who want to receive late availability information by putting "LA" in their notes field, and create a search for that, or even combine searches. Once you have executed your search and returned the group you want, you can then use the customised correspondence feature to automatically send each of them an individually addressed email under your own letterhead, simply by clicking three or four buttons.

Customised security settings You can choose to set up Five Star so that each user has their own password, and set different levels of access for each. For example, this would allow you to phone in from holiday to anyone in your office so that they could give you information from your booking records, without any risk that they might inadvertently delete them if they were not particularly computer literate.

more >