New Features
New version of the MICE module
Based on the thorough feedback from leading event professionals, we’ve improved Clock’s new MICE functionality to make your event planning smoother and more efficient than ever before.
Tracking every detail, from availability to guest communications, often feels overwhelming – especially when juggling other hotel responsibilities.
With Clock’s upgraded MICE upgraded functionality, the hosting of winning events is incredibly easy.
What’s new:
- Enhanced Flexibility and Speed: Quickly create and edit events with a compact, single-glance interface, reducing your time on administrative tasks.
- Integrated Venue Control: Manage meeting rooms, hotel rooms, and restaurant seats from one unified view, providing a seamless experience for you and your team.
- Advanced Automation: Adapt to changes effortlessly with automated systems for guest count adjustments and event rescheduling to handle any last-minute modifications smoothly.
- Modern user interface: Navigate our system effortlessly with enhancements that eliminate the need for multiple screens.
Enjoy improved guest communications, efficient billing, faster event creation and modification, automated adjustments, centralised venue management, and better staff collaboration.
Explore Clock’s new MICE features.
Occupancy Forecast
We have added more data and features to the "Occupancy Forecast" screen, allowing you to analyze your occupancy structure more quickly.
- Segmentation by Company and Agent - In addition to the existing options for occupancy segmentation - marketing source, channel, segment, and booking status, we have added two more segments: Company and Agent. If you select them, you will get a breakdown of occupancy from bookings and blocks by the associated Company or Agent. This will enable you to compare the performance of each of your partners.
- Arrival, Departure, Stayover, In Hotel - Rooms and Guests - If you have chosen the "Details" option, you can find data on the dynamics of bookings in the summary section. Until now, this information was available only in a separate report. By adding it to the Occupancy Forecast, you will now have access to this data in one place. Additionally, we have optimized the view of the summary section to make the report easier to read.
Booking - Automatic Child Age Verification
For hotels where the age of children is crucial for pricing or rates based on tour operator agreements, we have added a new feature that can help enforce automatic control. Here’s how the new control feature works:
- By default, the feature is turned off. To activate it, fill in the maximum age up to which guests are considered children in your hotel. Go to All Settings -> Bookings -> Child Age Verification. Fill in the "Child age verification - Max age" field and save.
- When checking in a booking, if there are fields filled in for the number of children, the following checks will be performed:
- Are the ages of each of the children filled in - If there are 2 children filled in, then two ages must be specified;
- Do the ages of the children match the birthdates in the registration cards - If there are two children and two ages filled in, do the registration cards and the birthdates provided in them match for guests of these ages;
- If the above checks find discrepancies between the number of children, their ages, and their birthdates in the registration cards, a To-Do will be created in the "Bookings" channel with the text "Children age discrepancy detected!" Review the To-Do in the channel to see the discrepancies and take the necessary actions.
- Strict child age verification - If you want to apply a stricter approach to these data, we have provided an additional setting "Strict child age verification (prevents check-in)." If you enable it and the system finds discrepancies during check-in, instead of generating a To-Do, the system will display an error and will not allow the booking to be checked in. In this case, to check in the booking, you must first edit the number of children and their ages to match the registration cards. Choose the level of control that you deem necessary.
Improvements
- BookDirect for Groups - We have added a new setting "Ask for guests at the first step". If individual hotels prefer this mode of operation, you can now apply it to your hotel chain’s booking system. The setting is located in "BookDirect for Groups - Settings," under the "Guests" group. It works similarly to "BookDirect" - when enabled, the guest must enter the number of adults and children, as well as their ages, at the first step. The benefit of this behaviour is that the prices shown in the following steps are accurately calculated for this combination of guests and child ages. On the other hand, the drawback is that the process of booking multiple rooms with different numbers of adults and children is not as intuitive. Choose the approach that best suits your needs.
- Folio Printing - Total Base and Total Tax - We added two more options for customizing the folio printout, allowing you to display the total taxable amount and tax amount just above the total. The settings for the folio view are located in All Settings -> Documents -> Folio Printing - defaults. Note that this concerns the standard folio printout. If you use a custom folio print format, we have provided the placeholders {{total_vat}} and {{net_value}}.
- Housekeeping Forecast report - By Sectors - In the new version of the report, we added the ability to group information by housekeeping sectors. You can choose whether to group by dates (as before) or by housekeeping sectors. There are also two additional improvements - you can freely select the report period instead of the previously fixed 10 and 30 days from today. We also added totals for each column. With the new sector grouping, you can see the workload of each sector for a given period and plan both the staff and inventory for that sector - linens, detergents, consumables, etc.
- Meal Report (new) - We added new filters for Restaurant and Meals.
- Payments Report (new) - We added a new filter "Payment service provider". If you are switching from one payment operator to another, you can get detailed information about the payments associated with each.
- The following reports have been moved to our new platform, with no functional changes: Booking Pace, Booking Segmentation, Bookings day-by-day, Bookings Awaiting Guarantee, Charge Modifier, Charge Template Availabilities, Guest Feedback, Meal, Meal Summary, Rate Control, Charges by Rooms, Transfers.
- Booking Import from CSV - For the purposes of the import, we added the "Branch" field of the Company.
Important: Note that for the import to function, you must correctly fill in the Company/Branch combination in the import file. For example, if you have one company with several branches, and the Company is present in the import file without a branch, it will not be found. In this case, you need to correct the import file and specify exactly which branch of the company the bookings refer to.
- Due to this change and the increasing reports of duplicate companies resulting from imports, we have removed the option for automatic Company creation. Generally, this option is more of a hindrance than a help during imports.
- There is now a link in the navigation to the new Settings screen only. We remind you that it includes a search function for settings by name or group, which can save you a lot of time. If you wish to access the old settings screen, you can do so from the button in the top right corner labeled "Old Version."
- We added a new quick completion feature in the To-Do search. After you select the filters, the To-Dos that meet these criteria are displayed, divided into pages of 50. With the new feature, you can quickly complete the To-Dos you see on the current page. If you intend to complete many To-Dos, it is advisable to use the "Not completed" filter.
- We added the newest currency "ZIG"
- Clock POS - we have added a new link to the "My User" screen where any user can easily activate their MFA and change their password.
Fixes
- SixPayments / Saferpay - we have made changes so that a refund operation no longer returns an error of type "Transaction already captured", even though it was successfully executed;
- cCredit - corrected system operation so that offline terminal payments do not generate errors due to missing specific data in the received response;
- Booking QR code - changed the way the QR code renders because certain email clients were not handling the old format well;
- Direct links from system emails (e.g., for a new reservation created through WRS) always required a login from users.