Purpose

To provide at a glance details of when rooms are occupied/free, at a specific (or all) accommodation(s), on a weekly basis.

Features:
1. Details of the student name, gender, age and language
2. Colours - used to distinguish gender and other booking states
3. Occupancy statistics
4. Age - this parameter allows a colour highlight to indicate students below a specific age at the start of the accommodation, eg, under 16.
Room changes can be made directly from the chart.

The chart enables schools to maximise occupation of accommodation, particularly to those with a large number of rooms, such as residences.
It can also be used to show the level of occupancy over any period of time for all or any specific type of accommodation, eg. Host Stay Single - Week Commencing 04/06/12 300/400 (75% occupancy).

It can also highlight the following possible problems:
Rooms overbooked (although the system warns when making the booking)
Booking students into a room that is "Not Available" (eg. it is being redecorated)
Booked mixed gender students into the same room

Selection screen:

Selection Criteria
First, select the criteria or specific accommodation to be included

Type
Select the accommodation type or "All".

Name
Select a single accommodation or leave blank for "All".
Next, select the date range to be investigated, this defaults to 12 weeks from today (but above, we have selected 24 weeks).
It is best to use the nearest most popular start day, eg. Saturday or Sunday. Alternatively, if you are looking for accommodation for a group starting on a Thursday, then use the Thursday start date, as the results will show available accommodations on a Thursday to Thursday basis.

Interval
Select the number of weeks to be checked.
Reducing the duration improves performance.

Weekly/Daily
Allows information to be displayed on either a weekly or daily basis.

From
Start date for calculations.

To
End date for calculations.

Other filters:
School
Grade (Range)
Town/Area
Room Types
Preferences (assumes "and" between each preference entered)

Cell content data sequence may be changed:



Spare Capacity, Fully Booked or All
These compare the number of beds in each room against the number of students booked in each day.
"Spare Capacity" may indicate empty or part-filled rooms.
"Fully Booked" includes over-booked rooms.
No check is made if "All" is selected.

Includes Males, Females or All
Only those rooms with a booking of the selected gender within the date range will be included.
No check is made if "All" is selected.
Please note that accommodations/rooms with mixed sexes will show in all selections.

Available Rooms, Not Available or All
These check to see if the room has been marked as not available for booking, eg. room being redecorated, for those dates.
No check is made if "All" is selected.

Sort Rooms By Capacity
The default is to show the rooms in Room Name sequence.
If selected, this will sort them by the number of beds.

Available - Total Date Range
If selected, other options are disabled and available rooms only matching on the total date range are displayed, eg. finding 20 beds for a group.

Calculate
Click on this to show the results once the selection has been made.
Selecting on a single accommodation takes little time to display but if say 500 families are selected, the system may take 1-2 minutes to calculate, depending on the system specification.
Note: The chart will automatically resize to your screen resolution. If your screen display is set to 800 x 600, 9 weeks are displayed.
12 week's worth of information can be seen by changing to the higher resolution 1024 x 768

Results - Single Accommodation

Notes:

1. You can hover or single-click a student to display more information:

2. Double-click the student to display the booking details (which may be updated, eg. room change). The change will only show if the display is refreshed

3. Double-click the nationality to display complete booking (which may be updated)

4. Double-click on the family to show their details

Help
This brings up a key to the colours:

Maximise columns
Shows columns at full width.

Refresh
Rechecks the booking details and redisplays the grid.
This allows the selection to remain onscreen (say for several hours) while bookings are processed.
You may refresh periodically, but not after every change as this is likely to affect machine performance if done too regularly.

Excel
This send the details to Excel to allow data manipulation and printing.