Guide

Take a booking over the phone or at the counter

Not every booking comes through your website. This is how to put one in yourself, in the order the form expects, and what happens after you save.

5 min read

This guide answers

  • How do I add a booking manually?
  • How do I take a phone booking?
  • Why can't I pick a vehicle yet?
  • Does the customer get an email when I create a booking?

Open Bookings in the sidebar and click New Booking.

The order matters

The form is built to be filled top to bottom, and one step genuinely depends on the one before it.

  1. Customer. Search for an existing customer, or create one from the same field if they are new.
  2. Pickup date and time, then Return date and time.
  3. Pickup location and Return location, and a pickup or return point if you use them.
  4. Vehicle.

The vehicle list stays greyed out until both dates are filled in. That is not a fault. Its options are the cars actually free for that exact window, so it has nothing to offer until it knows the window. If you find yourself unable to choose a car, go back and check both dates are set.

Pricing fills in automatically from your rates once the dates and vehicle are set. You do not price the booking by hand unless you want to override it.

About the daily rate

If you overwrite the daily rate, enter it the way you quote it to the customer — GST inclusive. Glovebox stores the GST-exclusive figure itself.

Overwriting it also locks it: the rate you typed is kept even if your pricing rules would have said something different. Leave it alone and the booking follows your rules.

Save

The booking reference is generated for you when you save. You do not choose it, and there is no need to leave it blank or invent one.

What happens after you save — read this part

Nothing is sent to the customer. Creating a booking does not email them a confirmation and does not ask them for money. That is deliberate: you are often on the phone to them while you do it, and an email firing mid-call helps nobody.

So the booking exists, and the customer has heard nothing. To take it further, open the booking and use:

  • Request payment — emails the customer a payment link. You choose whether that is the deposit, the balance, or an amount you type.
  • The Payments tab, if you have taken the money at the counter, to record it against the booking.

If you have balance automation switched on, the scheduled requests take over from here — see Automate balance payments and reminders.

Things worth knowing

  • A booking you create is marked as coming from the admin, so your reports can tell counter and phone bookings apart from website ones.
  • A vehicle on hold will not be offered. If a car is out of service, being transferred, or otherwise held for that window, it is greyed out with the reason. That is the same guard that stops your website double-booking it.
  • Entering an old booking for your records? There is a historical-import option under the advanced section. Bookings marked that way are kept out of the Xero sync, so migrating your back-catalogue does not create duplicate invoices for money you took months ago.

If it did not work

  • The vehicle list is empty. Every car of that type is already booked, held, or out of service for that window. Try different dates, or check the vehicle's status.
  • You cannot find the customer. Create them from the customer field rather than leaving in another tab; the booking keeps the one you make.
  • The total looks wrong. Check the dates first — hire length is worked out from them — then your pricing rules for that vehicle group and season.
  • Find the booking you are looking for The bookings list opens on Upcoming and has five other views. Knowing exactly what each one asks for is the difference between finding a booking and deciding it has vanished.
  • Set your deposit and balance rules Your deposit and balance rules decide how much a customer pays at booking and when the rest is due. This covers the deposit type, the minimum, and the pay-in-full window for last-minute bookings.
  • Automate balance payments and reminders Instead of clicking Request payment on every booking, Glovebox can send the balance requests and reminders for you. Glovebox asks for the money; it never takes it from a card on its own.

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