For church resource management the ChurchSuite Bookings module fits the bill! The person who is booking the resource - whether they're being charged or not - is referred to as a "Customer" in ChurchSuite. Today, we're excited to be able to announce some new features and functionality that will help manage customers in ChurchSuite - specifically those who are also also contacts in the Address Book.
In a nutshell, whilst it's always been possible to link a booking directly to a contact in the Address Book, we're now linking bookings to a contact-linked customer within the Bookings module - in the same way that this already works for Givers in the Giving module.
Here's what this means:
A central place for your customer information
The customer view page has always been the place to see the bookings and charge history relevant to that customer. Now that a customer can be linked to an Address Book contact the customer view page now acts as a central place to stay on top of bookings and charges for a contact. This change helps users to administrate non-contact customers and contact-linked customers in a consistent way.
New: process customers through booking flows and assign booking tags
The advantages to bringing Address Book contacts into the Bookings module as customers doesn't just stop with the customer view page. Contact-linked customers can now be processed through Bookings module flows and be included in Bookings module tags. This opens new avenues for churches to manage and organise their bookings customers.
New: Merge duplicated Customers
In addition, we'll now be surfacing potential duplicated customers in two places: on the Customer View and in a new Duplicated Customers report. We've built a simple-to-use merge option that allows you to merge duplicate customers, selectively retaining the best customer data and all their booking details.
We believe these improvements to the workflows for Bookings linked to Address Book Contacts are going to be a big help for anyone using the Bookings module!
