Faster Reports

We have recently gone through many of the Reports in Zaui and rewritten significant parts of the underlying logic in order to make them faster. After the changes, we are seeing about a 75% decrease in load times compared to the old reports! Here are some of the reports which have been changed:

• All Bookings
• All Internet Bookings – By Activity Date
• All Internet Bookings – By Date Created
• Products->All Bookings
• Packages->All Bookings
• All Taxes
• All Cancelled Bookings
• All Bookings Third Party
• All Sales
• Activities->Summary By Activity

We have also added some new columns and a products section to the Activities->Summary by Activity report. This is a very useful report which breaks down the sales totals for each activity and product, and gives aggregate totals at the bottom. If you are just looking for totals, it will be much faster to run this report than the All Bookings report. All of these changes will come through after the next update of your system.

We hope these faster reports save you time and continue to provide you with useful information for your business.

Cheers,

Your Zaui Team

Merchandise Products / Desktop / Browsing

You might have noticed, that as you accumulated many merchandise products in your system, the desktop “Products” panel would become increasingly cluttered.  In turn, this then lead to a increase in load time on the desktop, and made finding a particular product more difficult.

As a result, we have made the following change:

• The desktop “Products” panel now will only show you the top 30 products sold in your system.  We thought this would make the best sense, since the likelihood that the product your looking for, would be in this list.
• By limiting this to the top 30, we effectively are increasing the load time on the desktop in 2 ways:  decreasing processing on the server, and decreasing the data being sent back to your browser
• Third, we have added a new “Browse All Products”.  This will allow you to browse through all products and product categories you have in your system, if the particular item is not in your top 30.  This module is removed from the desktop and devoted entirely for just this purpose.  Once the product is found, simple click and add it to your cart.

We hope this makes things a bit more manageable for those Zaui clients who have 100′s or 1000′s of products.

Your Zaui Team

Change history, anyone?

We’re often asked about the changes that have been applied to a particular activity, or employee in the system, and of course, all this information is tracked and audited for us automatically.  So, we thought it would be great to built this into every single module we have in the system — giving you the power to view the change history for any item in the system yourselves.

As a result, you will now find in each module, next to the “Save”, “Cancel”, buttons a new  “View Change History” button.  This will report all the known audit details for that particular record in the system, opening up out internal Fine Grain Audit Trail (FGAT) that we use often to determine configuration items within your systems.

About the FGAT

• the audit trail is an automatic feature within Zaui for you.
• all field changes are automatically logged for you
• all audit trail items are automatically purged from the system after 4 months
• audit details include:  field name, old value, new value, who changed it, when they changed it.
• brief list of audited modules:
  • account groups
  • account industries
  • account types
  • accounts
  • booking questions
  • client database
  • commissions codes
  • contacts
  • countries
  • cities
  • towns
  • discounts
  • discount reasons
  • hotels
  • packages
  • package categories
  • pickups
  • pickup location groups / zones
  • price codes
  • products and merchandise
  • product categories
  • system settings
  • taxation settings
  • activities cancellations
  • activity categories
  • activities
  • activity lunches
  • activity reviews – client reviews
  • employee records
  • wait list items
  • internet booking management settings
  • credit card management settings
  • activity notes and restrictions
  • contacts
  • Zaui API settings
  • airlines

Just to name a few.

Many of you already receive on a daily basis the general audit report for the entire system in the morning.

NOTE:  Sorry, this powerful feature is only available for admins.

Your keen Zaui Staff

New Report – Monthly Forecast

We have just finished a new report which shows your aggregate booking data in calendar format. Inside each calendar day, you will see every activity with one or more bookings, the number of bookings on that activity, the total capacity, and the percent occupancy. The occupancy numbers are inside a colored box which corresponds to the percentage occupancy. The scale goes through 10 colors from dark blue (0% to 10% occupancy) to red (100% + occupancy) and there is a complete key below the report. We have also added buttons to navigate between months inside the report – so you don’t have to go back and regenerate the report each time. You can choose to generate the report for a specific activity, or leave the activity box empty to view all activities.

The colors should allow you to quickly see activities which are approaching capacity so that you can make the proper adjustments, and the report gives a good breakdown of your booking numbers for the month. The report is located under Reports -> Operations -> Monthly Forecast and will be available after the next update of your system. We hope that this report helps to further streamline your operations!

New Report – Repeat Customers

We have just added a new report which shows you bookings from repeat customers. The report is available under Reports -> Customers -> Repeat Customers – By Date Booked or Repeat Customers – By Activity Date. If any customers have more than one booking number within the time period you select (by date booked or by activity date), you will see all of their bookings and information. We hope this information about your loyal customers helps you in whatever way you choose to use it.

Month to date – Historical Overview (Desktop)

We have now added a month to date (MTD) calculated value to the desktop historical overview (admin only).  This value will now tell you in real time, for the current month, what your total number of guests are.

About the Historical Overview

Here are some brief notes about the historical overview, which you might not be aware of:

• the values are pre-cached for 2 mins.  This means that the data here is only updated after 2 mins in the system
• the numbers shown are for all passenger types that you have configured in your system
• the historical overview only compiles data for the current date, regardless of dates that you have selected from the desktop
• clicking on the graphical icon will show your numbers in graphical bar graphs

Your Zaui Team

Package Reports

We recently had inquires asking us why the format of the package report was slightly different from the all bookings report.  To be honest, it was an oversight on our part.

As a result, we have recently changed the format of the package report so that it matches the format of the all bookings report for consistency.

This new format will appear as your system has been updated.

Zaui Crosstalk

Zaui Crosstalk, our intern code name for this project, was up to just recently still considered a “clandestine” Zaui project.

In short, this new feature, when available in fourth quarter 2010, will allow Zaui users the ability for Zaui to Zaui automated integration.  If you have industry partners whom either are resellers of your product, or perhaps you sell each others (or repackages those), this feature will the ability to both remotely poll inventory, created bookings, remote bookings, and automated invoices, and invoice tracking.  All in real-time.

This integration for franchises, organization, or individual operators, will further extend their ability to efficiently and easily grow existing revenue streams, and build new ones, in a streamlined, automated process in your existing Zaui system.

Your Zaui Team

Hop on Hop off Location Capacity

Sounds techy?  Well it is and it isn’t.

If your using our point to point activities in your system (normally airport shuttles, schedule shuttle service) then you will know that the ability to accurately calculate exact capacities along your route are sometimes impossible, and always labour intensive.

Well, we have come up with a innovative mechanism that allows you to control inventories at any point along your route, visualize this data, and maximize your total route capacity — all automatically through Zaui.

If this still sounds a bit confusing, here’s a real world example:

I’m a shuttle operator, with a shuttle starting at the Vancouver Airport, pickup/dropoff in downtown Vancouver, a second location in West Vancouver, with final stops in Whistler.  This shuttle then returns in the opposite direction.  I operate a 33 passenger van for this route.

Without being able to perform single location capacity checks, my total route capacity is 33 passengers.  However, between the airport and downtown, I might have 15 people, dropping off 5, and picking up 20.  What this feature (still in development) will allow your staff to visualize, is at each location:

• what is my occupancy
• what is my percentage of occupancy
• how many does my driver drop off
• how many does my driver pickup

This means that for your 33 passenger van, you can transport 33 * (total number of pickup/drop off stops), with 100% accuracy of passenger pickup/drop off destinations.

We call it Point to Point Capacity Calculation or simply PPCC.

Coming August 2010.

Your Zaui Team

Reports – All Bookings – New field added

A new field that indicates the company group has been added to both the activity and product, portions of the All Bookings report.

If your using this facility in the system (located under the menu system Contacts | Manage Agents | Agent Groups) then your group categorization will appear on this report.  Very useful if you often load this report into OpenOffice or MS Excel.