Accessories
Some example uses of Accessories:
- Available colors for tablecloths.
- Flavors or servings for cotton candy machine.
- Art panels for a bounce house.
There are two lists of inventory: Rentals and Accessories. Accessories get linked to Rentals and are only offered to the customer when the Rental is selected.
An Accessory can be linked to as many rental items as you wish. So if you have an art panel that can go on a Modular Bounce House as well as on a Modular Combo, InflatableOffice will track availability of this Accessory across multiple Rentals.
Adding an Accessory into your inventory is very similar to adding a main Rental unit. Click on the drop down arrow and click "Add Accessory"
You must add a price to the Accessory in order to save it; however that price could be $0. Once the Accessory is saved, you need to let InflatableOffice know which Rental(s) this is an accessory to. In order to do this, you need to edit the Rental item you want to attach the accessory to. While editing the "Accessories" area of the Rental item, use the search box to find the Accessory you want to add to the Rental. Click on a search result to attach that Accessory to the Rental item.
Concession Machine Supplies
A common use of Accessories is to add supplies for a concession machine. You'll typically want to list these in terms of how many "Servings" the customer will get if you are going to be allowing customers to submit for a quote/book online (because the customer will not necessarily know how many servings a "Popcorn Pack" makes). When adding an accessory called "Extra Servings/Supplies" you'll want to click "Advanced Quantity Options" and enter the increment that you sell servings in. In this example we're doing increments of 50 (the customer can enter 50, 100, 150, 200, etc...).
Edit
Finally, When adding a price to this Accessory, you are going to want to make sure you divide the price by 50, or whatever your increment is.
Make an Accessory "Required"
Some accessories are not simply optional add-ons, but are required. An common example of this would be a free Accessory called "50 servings of popcorn" that's added to a Popcorn Machine Rental (along with this required 50 servings, you can still offer the optional Accessory "Extra servings of popcorn.")
Link Accessory Quantity to the Main Unit
If you want the Accessory quantity to always be the same as the main unit, then use this feature. A common example of this might be linking the quantity of "chair cover" Accessories to the number of "Chair" Rentals. These quantities update regardless of whether you are using a drop down, text box, or hidden input.
List your Accessories as Separate Units
For example if you have a Bounce House with 3 mod panels, normally the customer has to choose the Bounce House, then they can choose the panel they want. Now, the customer can just see the Mod panel as if it was its own unit but the conflict system will still prevent double-bookings of the main unit and the panels. This feature is only on the customer pages, not on the back end.
Now when you view your quote page you'll see your Accessories listed as if they are separate main rental units and the Bounce House is no longer shown.
If you would like the plain Bounce House to be shown, simply create an Accessory ‘Plain Bounce House,’ (or any title of your choosing.)
Append rental name to Accessory name
Normally when you choose to show Accessories as separate units, the Accessory name is used as the display name for the customer. If you have Accessories that apply to multiple units, this may not work well for you. So, we allow you to choose to append the rental name to the Accessory.
As an example, you might have an Accessory called “Dora” that goes with your “4-in1 Bounce House” and your “15ft Slide”. In this case you would choose to append the rental names to the Accessory so that the customers see “Dora 4-in1 Bounce House” and “Dora 15ft Slide”.
Add a custom picture to an Accessory
InflatableOffice will use the Accessories saved picture by default. However in some cases, you may want to display a different picture when attached to a particular rental. The most common example of this is with modular bounce houses and modular combos that take art panels.
In order to do this, First, you need to go to the main rental item in the inventory (the bouncer that the art panel attaches to). Edit the Accessories area of that rental's settings. While editing there, you can upload custom pictures for that accessory attached to that rental.
Hidden-Required Accessories
Since InflatableOffice tracks the availability of Accessories, there may be some equipment you'll want hide to the customer, but require it to go with the rental when it goes out. A common example of this might be with a Mechanical Bull Rental and a Mechanical Surfboard Rental. Often times, these two rentals are controlled by the same "Control Module." If one of these rentals goes out, the other rental cannot because the Control Module is unavailable. A similar affect can be accomplished using InflatableOffice's Parent/Child feature; however this method may be a cleaner solution.
To set this up, you'll want to edit the Accessory and edit it's "Pages" on the Advanced Features area of the Accessory. Unselect all the pages so that it won't display anywhere to the customer (you'll likely want to leave it displaying on the Packing List though). Then, make the Accessory required using the method listed above.