Increasing rates for next year

(This article assumes that you have Rates set up for your rental charges rather than entering all charges manually, and in particular applies if you use Auto-rates).

At some point you're probably going to want to increase your rates for the next year.  If you're already taking reservations for next year then you want to make sure that quotes and confirmation letters show next year's rates, not this year's.  But of course you can't just change the amounts in your Rates definitions because that would charge the new rates to people staying this year also.

Basically what you need to do is enter all new rate definitions for next year's rates, while keeping this year's rates in the system.  While this sounds like a tedious project, there are a couple tricks to doing it easily and quickly.  Here is the process we recommend:

1. Go to Maintenance / Park Setup / Rates.

2. Select ALL of the rates that need to be increased (Ctrl-click on each one, to select multiple rates).  You don't need to select every rate, but you should copy all associated rates even if some of them won't change, to avoid confusion (e.g. if only the daily rate is increasing, then copy the weekly and monthly rates also if they would apply to the same sites).

3. Click "Copy Selected Rates".  This will create a copy of each rate and add it to the end of the rates list.

4. Select the first of the copied rates and "Edit rate definition" (or better yet, just double-click on the rate to edit it).

5. Add something like "2006" to the Description so you know it's next year's rate.

6. Adjust the "Each" amount for the charges as needed.

7. Enter next year's season into "Season Dates Applicable" so that this rate only applies to reservations for next year.  This should be entered in a form similar to "4/1/06 to 10/31/06".  (Canadian data formats may be reversed like "1/4/06 to 31/10/06".)  Of course if you already have specific dates in this field, e.g. holiday dates, these need to be altered appropriately.

8. (optional) Highlight the season date range entered and press Ctrl-C to copy the text, so you don't have to type them over and over.

9. Click Save.

10. Repeat steps 4 through 9 for each of the other copied rates for next year.  You can use Ctrl-V to paste the season dates into the other rates, if you copied them in step 8.

11. Now you need to move these new rates to the top of the list so they are checked *before* the default (current) rates.  Select each of the copied/modified rates, and click "Move Up" until they're above the normal rates.  Note: If you didn't copy and modify all rates, some inter-mingling may be required for it to work properly.  Just keep in mind the ordering rules for auto-rates (see the documentation for details).

Now it should correctly use the new rates for next year's reservations.  Keep in mind that next year you will need to either update the season dates (e.g. to extend the rates to 2007, 2008, etc) so they work for later years, or else repeat the process for each year's rates increases.  We don't recommend deleting the old rates later, because that could cause old reservations to re-calculate if you do any changes to them later, especially long-term stays.  In fact, setting the Season Dates for old rates to be more specific might help avoid problems of using the wrong rates.