The essensys Credits system allows you to sell credit packages to customers, which they can use instead of cash when making purchases from your organisation. Credits can be used to purchase meeting rooms, desks and other products associated with facilities and reservation product groups. This guide provides need-to-know information and things to consider before you activate and configure essensys Credits.

Credits are set up as a Credit Pack product type and can be made available to purchase via the Point of Sale or online on the Portal. They can also be added to a licence or via a charge / batch sheet.

Credits can be free of charge, or chargeable. In order to apply them to an account, they must be included on an approved invoice (even if the credits are free of charge) or on a saved charge sheet.

No invoicing is done in Credits, only in Cash. Therefore, customers will only see their Credit Pack purchases on their invoices.

If the credits are allocated through a licence, then at the end of each billing period, there are two possible scenarios: 

You have the possibility to choose whether one or the other occurs, by configuring your Credit Packages according to your desired result.

Credits are taken from an account at the time/date of the calendar event, not the time/date it was booked.

Credit packs have a lifetime that defines when the credits expire. Where credit pack products have a fixed duration of, say, one month, any unused credits in that pack will expire one month after the pack’s start date and will not be available for the member to use.

The lifetime duration of a credit pack can be any quantity of days or months. This is configured in the product when you create the credit pack. For instance, credit packs can be given a duration of 12 months to make the pack last a whole year.

Credit Packs can be ‘open ended’ so that the pack does not define an expiry and the credits will be available until they are all used up. In order to use credits in this way, you would leave the lifetime field blank in the credit product setup.

The credit balance of any customer account can be viewed on the Account page within Operate, Member Portal or Mobile App. There are three important fields that provide information to both you and your members:

No of Credits: the total number of credits that have been purchased and are valid on the account at that moment in time.

Credits Used: the number of credit which have been used for bookings covering the period of time up to the last expiration date of all valid credit packs.

Credits Remaining: the remaining number of credits, out of the valid credit pack(s).

If a user has been set to “on account” they will be able to make a booking without any valid credits. If they make a booking at a time when there are no valid credits to cover the purchase, the credits used will not reflect this particular booking. This will be updated when either they purchase a credit pack later which does cover the time of this booking (so it will be automatically deducted from the new pack) or it will need to be be charged as an overage if the timing of the meeting passes and no credit pack was purchased.

There will be two instances where you will need to charge for overages:

You will need to charge for overages within the billing period that covers the time of the booking.

Online Plans cannot be paid for using Credits, but Credit Packs can be included in an Online Plan as an add-on.  
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You cannot use essensys Credits in conjunction with Meeting Credits, Meeting Packages or Standard Discounts (set on an account). Please see more information here on the different discounting options available within Operate.

To ensure that your Account and Product records display Credits related information, please edit their page layouts as explained below.

This will enable Operate to show these fields on Account and Product pages. You will need these fields to go through the steps below. 

If you over allocate credits, please create a Credit Note using the Credit Pack as the credited product. Read more about creating Credit Notes.

Please note that Cancellation Policies do not apply when the customer is charged for the meeting room or desk using essensys Credits. If you need to charge for a cancellation, you can use the Point of Sale to do so.

The credits spent on a cancelled booking will be refunded automatically unless the booking has already started at the time of the cancellation. If you wish to refund your customer for a booking that has already started, you will need to add credits to their account via a charge sheet or point of sale.

If you have read through this article and essensys Credits align with how you operate your space, you can go ahead with installing and configuring the application. Please follow the article here in order to do so.