Developed specifically for self-catering Unlike Property Management Systems designed for hotels, Five Star does not calculate prices according to a fixed per day rate, irrespective of the length of the booking. With Five Star, rates are entered on a weekly basis, and prices for short breaks are calculated as a percentage of the weekly rate, according to the precise combination of weekdays and weekend days in the booking. The percentages for each combination are set by you, and can be made to vary with each property and/or each season of the year. You can also specify minimum durations for both weekday and weekend short breaks, and which days of the week bookings may begin and/or end, and these restrictions can also vary with property and/or season. Also, Five Star's accounting reports and late payment warnings reflect the fact that self-catering bookings are paid for before rather than after arrival.

A fully internet capable Property Management System not just a bookings database Five Star can create availability charts for each of the properties on your website, and update them automatically in real time from the bookings you enter manually on the system. Because Five Star also automatically calculates your rates for each property, based on the dates and length of the booking, and automatically applies any restrictions you have set, even short break bookings can be quoted for accurately 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. Five Star is fully networkable, so that you can set it up to accept bookings from more than one computer. Five Star keeps track of all deposits, payments and extras, calculates the VAT where applicable, generates financial reports and exports the data to small business accounting packages.

No need to access your data via the internet as it is held on YOUR computer Unlike with booking systems that you can only access through the internet, with Five Star not only your software but, more crucially, all your business data, guest details and booking details are securely held on your own hard drive. Quite apart from the delay, inconvenience and expense of having to use the internet just to check your availability when you receive a telephone enquiry, this avoids you being at the mercy of the reliability of your telephone lines. Worse still, if all your information is held on a web-only booking system, you take the risk of the company that provides the system going into insolvency, which is far from unusual with internet firms.

In this event, YOUR data could become the property of that company's creditors and the receiver would have a legal duty to extract the maximum possible for it on their behalf. This could involve your having to pay or sue to get access to your own booking records after a long interval, and your guests' contact details being passed to junk mail organisations or to self-catering agencies.

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