What are essensys Credits
essensys Credits are seen as another currency that you can charge your customers with (as opposed to charging cash). Credits apply to meeting rooms, coworking (bookable) desks and any other products that are deemed a Catering, Reservation or Facilities product. Credits can be an additional revenue stream for your business if you choose to create and monetise credit packages.
Installing the Credits App
Go to Settings > Integrations and install the essensys Credits app by clicking the 'Install' button next to it, as shown below:
Configuring Credits
To begin configuring credits, navigate to Settings > General > Credits > essensys Credits.
Within the Credits Configuration Area, you will find four tabs:
Configuration: configure the general settings for Credits functionality.
Credit Packages: create credit packages that you can add to a licence or enable customers to purchase via the portal and/or mobile app.
Products: enable particular products to be made purchaseable with credits (as opposed to cash).
Client Types: configure your existing client types to use either cash or credits.
Configuration
Tick Enable Essensys Credits to activate the credits functionality within your Operate database and hit Save.
Credit Packages
Credit packages are managed by Operate as Products; therefore this tab works in conjunction with the Products module.
Any credit packs created can be added to a licence, charge sheet, batch sheet and point of sale. They can also be made purchaseable through the portal and mobile app.
This area will give the Operator control over which credit packs are available to be purchased at any time.
To create a Credit Package:
Click Add Credit Package.
You will now see the Product Types screen. Please select the Credit Pack type here:
Please enter the required information for the Credit Pack, the same way you would for any other Product. For example: a product name, product group, location, price, etc. The price of the product in this case will also be the purchasing price of the Credit Pack. If you are creating packs to add to a licence, you can also make them zero value.
At the end of the Credit Pack product record, you will need to fill out the Credits section:
No of Credits: the amount of credits included in the pack
Credit Lifetime: the length of time before the credit pack will expire (from the date of purchase)
Lifetime Frequency: linked to the credit lifetime number, can be months, days, years
Enable Online: ticking this box will allow customers to purchase this package on the Portal
Save your Credit Pack when you have populated the necessary fields.
Note: We recommend that you create a "Credits" product group to allow you to report on credits and manage them with ease. Learn more about working with Product Groups.
Once created, Credit Packages will be displayed within the corresponding section of the essensys Credits configuration area. You can edit any pack by clicking the pencil icon next to it, then making any changes you require, as explained above.
Products
This tab will show all the products that are included either within a Catering and/or Facilities Product Group, marked as such under Space > Product Groups. Please read more about Product Groups for further information.
Products included in a Product Group that is marked as a Catering, Reservations or Facilities Group may be purchased with Credits. This can be done via the Operate Calendar, or the Member Portal and Mobile App as part of a meeting room or desk booking.
Catering Products:
There are two fields on Product records:
Enable Credits: checking this field will allow purchasing the product using credits.
No of Credits: this represents the value of the product, in credits.
To make a product purchaseable using Credits, you will need to check the Enable Credits field and add a credit price to the No of Credits field.
Meeting Rooms and Desks
When creating or editing meeting rooms and desks, first, the Enable Credits field must be checked.
This will display two new fields in the Rates section of the meeting room or desk product record: Internal Credit Rate and External Credit Rate.
Given that on the Credits Configuration tab, the Enable Off-Peak field has been checked, there will be two other fields as part of the rates, called Morning Off Peak and Evening Off Peak. Once the Enable Off-Peak field has been checked in the configuration, these two fields will override the ‘hourly’, ‘half day’ and ‘day’ fields and will pull using the hours set on the location.
When adding credits as a monetary value, think of 1 credit being equal to a currency value i.e. 1 credit = £/$5.00. You can then work out how many credits you will need to allocate based on the monetary values in Internal Rate and External Rate.
Client Types
This tab displays all the client types and their associated organisation. Here you can select whether the payment method for each client type should set to ‘cash’ or ‘credits’. To help your users understand which client types are credits vs. cash, we suggest adding 'credit' or 'cash' to the client type name in question i.e. Resident - Cash and Resident - Credits. To add or edit client types, refer to the help article here.
Depending on what has been selected, this will pre-determine meeting room bookings to be displayed as either cash or credits within Operate and the Portal.
Ensuring credit information is displayed in your Accounts and Products
To ensure that your Account and Product records display credit information, please edit their page layouts as detailed below:
Navigate to Settings > General > Customize > Accounts > Page Layouts and follow the instructions in Customizing Page Layouts in essensys Operate to edit the Account page layout (Prospects and Brokers will not be using Credits). Add the following fields to the layout: 'No. Of Credits', 'Credits Used' and 'Credits Remaning'. We suggest adding them to the 'At a Glance' section of the page.
Navigate to Settings > General > Customize > Products > Page Layouts and edit all product type pages according to the instructions provided in Customizing Page Layouts in essensys Operate. Add the following fields to the layout: 'Enable Credits' and 'No of Credits'. We suggest adding them to the 'Additional Options' section.
Now essensys Credits are installed and configured, please refer to this guide to turn Customers/Accounts from Cash to Credits.