Whether you own multiple store locations, offer rentals on top of your typical offerings, or simply have a lot of availabilities — managing your inventory can be overwhelming. But that’s where FareHarbor’s resources feature comes in!

Properly tracking your inventory is vital for both your business and your customers. It will help you avoid overbooking, and in turn, upset guests. Read on to learn what resources are, why you need to be tracking them, and if your business is the right fit to be using them. 

What exactly are resources?

Generally speaking, resources can be anything with a limited quantity that is used for an activity. For example, they can be; equipment, such as kayaks or bicycles; vehicles, such as tour buses or boats; or even staff, such as tour guides. 

In your FareHarbor Dashboard, you can assign your different resources to multiple items in order to better manage your inventory or capacity. 

For instance, say you have one boat that is used for two tours that happen at the same time. The boat will be available to both tours at first, but when you receive a booking for tour A, tour B automatically closes off. This happens because both Dashboards recognize that the boat is already used on tour A and it will no longer be available for tour B. 

This same concept can be applied to any other inventory.

Benefits of properly tracking your inventory

• They prevent the chance of overbooking. Items that share resources will automatically close out if one of them is booked.
• They will help you maximize your revenue as you can have multiple types of offerings available at once.
• They enhance overall efficiency and logistical planning for your tours and rentals across times slots and locations.
• They’re automated which will save you time! Once set up, there is no extra work on your part when it comes to allocating tour guides, equipment, and other resources.
• They will increase your customer satisfaction and overall experience. For instance, you can avoid unnecessary hiccups like when a customer shows up for a tour that cannot happen because a resource was accidentally assigned to two tours at once. 
• They can reduce your staff turnover and dissatisfaction as there will be no confusion about which activity they are assigned to. 
• They can reduce wear and tear on equipment. When tracking your resources, you can ensure you are not over-utilizing a certain piece of equipment compared to others.

Which businesses should be using resources?

Although they are versatile, resources are better suited for certain kinds of companies. For example, rental and charter companies who need to keep close track of their inventory may find it more useful than companies who only sell day passes for their tours. 

Furthermore, companies that want to count the capacity of certain customer types and not others may find this useful as well. For example, you may not want children or pets to be counted towards your capacity, but you still need to know if they will be present. This can be the case if you own a boat and need to know how many souls are on board, per requirement of the Coast Guard. While you need to know children or pets are on board, they do not need to take a seat away from your capacity. 

Finally, resources are great for companies that want to count group bookings more accurately. If you have a single customer type such as a family of four, resources will actively count four seats off the total capacity, reducing your workload by automatically keeping track of occupied seats. This works well with our seating assignment feature that is a customizable tool to visualize and manage your bookable space. 

Pro Tip: We highly recommend contacting FareHarbor Support if you need to add, remove, or make changes to your resources. Because resources affect your online calendar, book form, availability capacity, and more, it’s best to let us know so we can ensure all parts of your Dashboard are updated accordingly.

Where can I see how my resources are being used?

There are many options! You can keep track of resource uses from the Manifest or Bookings section of your Dashboard, as well as an individual availability. All of these places have different uses, so be sure to check out each option to see which view is best for your needs. And of course, our team can help guide and give more detailed suggestions. Here is a great help page to get started.

If you still have questions about resources or want to know if they are right for you, please reach out to our Support team. Resources can be very complex in some cases and we are here to take care of any issues or changes you may need. 

If you want to learn how to manage resources yourself — watch our recorded webinar that will walk you through the process!