First, make sure you have a FH Admin account in the demo environment. Someone on your team can set this up for you.

To log into the Admin Dashboard:

1. Go to https://demo.fareharbor.com/login/.
2. In the shortname field, type admin and log in.
3. Enter your username and password.
4. Click the Log in button.

1. From the Admin homepage, click New company and fill out all required fields.

   

2. Under General, keep the “charter company” box checked. No need to check the “affiliate company” box for now, unless you specifically want to create an affiliate (reseller) company.

3. Under Payments, leave all pre-populated fields as is.

4. Under Sales & Support, leave Salesperson and Tier blank, and uncheck the “demo mode” box (unchecking this box makes it easier to test online bookings).

5. Click Create company

Optional: enable features

Once the company has been created, you can go to the advanced company settings and choose which features you want to enable for your Dashboard (if you’re not sure which features to turn on, you can skip this step for now).

To update advanced company settings, go to Settings and click the gear icon at the top of the Changelog. Or, use the keyboard shortcut Shift + ,. While you’re here, go to the notifications under Actions and enable locations, smart capacities, and item colors.

Now that you’ve created your company, you’ll want to get some basic settings taken care of. After that, you’ll put together the actual components required for a functioning Dashboard: items, customer types, custom fields, and availabilities.

The basics

1. Make your company look legit by adding a logo and some contact info. Go to Settings > Info & Policies and click the Logo & Contact tab.

2. Create a couple of fake users with different permissions, so you can test out permission groups. Go to Settings > Users & Permissions to create users. Click the Permission Groups tab to view and/or edit the default permission groups.

3. Optional: Complete the Payment Setup Checklist. This is an important step for all new companies in production, so it’s good to know how to do. Follow these steps to complete the demo Payment Setup Checklist.

   Note: Only company users (not FH Admins) can accept the Terms of Service. To complete this step, you’ll need to log out and log back in as one of your fake users.

4. Personalize your customer communications. Go to Settings > Info & Policies and write some Confirmation Notes and Default Cancellation Notes. It’s also a good idea to set up a couple of canned messages, which can be used in automatic emails as well as any time you are emailing or texting a customer.

   Learn more about canned messages.

Items

This is where you get to create some activities for your new company. Items can be tours, rentals, events, classes, etc. (feel free to get creative!). It’s nice to mix it up a little so you can try out different item setups.

Setting up an item is a multi-step process. Here are the basic steps you’ll want to follow:

• Create an item
• Add a description and photos
• Set the item’s online booking settings

You’ll also need to add customer types, custom fields, and availabilities to the item before it can be booked online. The following sections will show you how to do this.

Customer types

Customer types are the various bookable options that appear on the book form (People, Adults, Tickets, Private Charter, etc.).

Customer types are created in your Dashboard’s main settings, then added to items, where their pricing and visibility is set up. This means that you can have one customer type (e.g. “Adult”) that is used on multiple items, and has a different price depending on the item.

As the next step of the Dashboard setup process, create your customer types, then add them to your existing items and availabilities. See: Setting up customer types

Custom fields

These are customized questions or text fields that can be added to your book form. There are many different types of custom fields (text input, checkbox, dropdown, etc.), which you can learn more about here.

Things to know:

• Custom fields can be visible to online customers or made private if they only need to be used on the backend.

• Custom fields can be set up to affect the pricing on a book form, if needed.

• Custom fields can be assigned to individual customer types (for example, asking each individual on a booking for their height), or to the whole booking (like a comments box).

Custom field setup

Some commonly-used custom fields will already be created on your new Dashboard, but it’s a good idea to create some more to get familiar with the process (especially custom fields that affect pricing).

See Setting up custom fields for a complete walkthrough.

Once you feel comfortable setting up custom fields, try some more advanced setups, such as conditional fields and default values.

Availabilities

Availabilities represent a particular date and time that an item can be booked. From a reservationist or online customer’s point of view, availabilities are the most “visible” part of the booking process, i.e. the part of the calendar you can click on to create a booking.

Essentials for working with availabilities:

• Creating availabilities
• Duplicating availabilities
• Updating availabilities

You could also try adding crew to some of your availabilities, using some of the fake users you created earlier. Crew is an important part of many companies’ setups.

Once you’ve set up all of the above and have created some availabilities, you can start creating bookings for your demo company! (There are, of course, a lot of other details we haven’t covered, but for now you’ve connected the biggest pieces of the Dashboard).

Now it’s time to make some bookings for your demo company, and see if everything works as expected.

Test as an anonymous user

‘Anonymous user’ is another way of saying ‘online customer.’ You can walk through the booking process as an online customer by opening a different browser or private window and going to demo.fareharbor.com/yourcompanyshortname

If that doesn’t work, it’s likely because your Dashboard is in demo mode. Go to the Settings section of your Dashboard and look for a “preview link” like the one below.

Here you can view your items as an online customer would see them. If you feel inspired, create a few test bookings.

Test as a reservationist

Now’s the time to make use of those users you set up earlier. Choose one of your users (preferably one with the Reservationist permission group) and log in as that user.

From the Bookings section of the Dashboard, choose an availability and click New booking to create a test booking. See Creating a booking for steps on how to do this. Remember to create payments using the test credit card number (see “Making test payments” above).

Utilize booking actions

There’s a lot you can do with a booking once it’s been created, like refunding a credit card payment or adding a customer type. The options available on an existing booking are called booking actions, and it’s helpful to know how they work.

Check out the Manifest

This is a must-have for most companies. The Manifest allows you view and organize all booking information for a given day. Learn more about what you can do with the Manifest and how you can customize it.

Even if you don’t try them out right away, you should be aware of the features below. You can read the help pages for a detailed walkthrough on how to set up and use them.

Locations

Adding locations allows our clients to take advantage of our growing number of location-related features, like the option to include map links in emails and calendar events. Locations can be customized per item, ensuring that customers always get the correct information for the activity they’ve booked.

Campaigns and promo codes

This is a big one; clients want to set up promotional codes all the time. It’s a multi-step process that involves campaigns, custom fields, and items. Learn how to set up campaigns and promo codes.

Gift certificates and gift cards

Like campaigns and promo codes, these are very popular features. Before we built out gift cards, we had a separate process for setting up gift certificates. Many companies still use this method.

The advantage of the gift card setup is that the booking flow is much smoother for the end customer, and feels more like they’re purchasing a retail item rather than an activity. Learn how to set up gift cards.

Check out our internal Gift Cards, Gift Certificates, and Groupons page as well.

Check-In

There’s a check-in feature built into FareHarbor, as well as support for QR code scanning. Most big companies need to use some kind of check-in process, so this is good to know.

FareHarbor Profile

Every FareHarbor Dashboard comes with a FareHarbor Profile (e.g. https://demo.fareharbor.com/islandtours/), even if the company uses a different website for their booking flow. In most cases, this serves as a sort of “backup” booking website, although some companies use it as their primary booking source.

FareHarbor.me / FareHarbor Sites

FareHarbor.me (also called FareHarbor Sites) is FareHarbor’s hosted website platform. It’s a free service offered to clients, with the goal of optimizing their online booking flow. Setting up a mock website using FH.me is helpful for getting a feel for how these are built. Check in with @vlad or @adam to get set up, or read through our internal documentation.

Resources

Many companies use physical resources across multiple items (like kayaks, tourguides, cabins, etc.). Resources are managed in the Items section of the Dashboard (click the Shared Resources) toggle at the top of the Items page.

Experiment with creating resources, adding them to items (Options & Prices > Required Resources), and making a few test bookings to see how resources affect capacity and online bookability.

See also:

• How to set up resources (internal) within our internal Resources section
• Resources (client-facing pages)

Transportation

Usage of transportation is most common among Hawaiian companies, but is important for any companies who offer pickup locations and times to their customers.

Transportation first has to be enabled in a company’s advanced settings. Once that’s done, you’ll see the option in your Dashboard settings to manage Lodging, Pickup Locations, and Routes. Custom fields for transportation can be used to ask customers where they are staying, so they can receive pickup information in their confirmation email. How to set up transportation.

Price sheets

Every time you are updating the price or visibility of a customer type or custom field, you are using price sheets. While updating prices and visibility alone is a pretty simple process, understanding the way price sheets work (and what they affect) is very important. See our Introduction to price sheets for a more detailed overview.

Disputes

Most companies will run into disputes every once in a while. It’s important to note that disputes also involve Stripe (our payment processor) and the end customer’s bank or credit card company. Here are some resources on disputes.

Reporting

Reporting is an essential tool for many companies’ managers and accountants. FareHarbor provides a ton of data that can be sliced in many different ways. Learn more about reports.

Affiliates and Invoicing

Many companies use other distribution channels to sell their items. This could be the mom & pop shop down the street, or an online travel agency like Expedia. Affiliate users can make bookings for partner companies in FareHarbor, even if they’re not part of a FareHarbor company. FareHarbor also manages affiliate invoicing with the use of invoice price sheets.

External affiliate documentation is still being built out, but you can read the Channel Support team’s help pages here.

Several comprehensive lessons on Dashboard-building can be found in FareHarbor’s Lessonly library. Filter by Courses and look for the “Building a Dashboard” courses (1 through 4).

If you want to dive deeper, there are also complete courses focusing on customer types, custom fields, resources, and integrations.

Don’t have a Lessonly account? Reach out to @christine to get set up!

Here’s a list of pages you may want to consult during the build process. Much of the process can be found in our external documentation, but certain steps are internal only. Internal help pages are marked with an asterisk (*).

• Creating items
  • Duplicating an item*
  • Setting up retail items*
• Setting up customer types
• Setting up custom fields
  • See also: Tips for effective custom fields
• Canned messages
  • See the admin notes for default confirmation and follow-up language
• Adding and editing users

Below is a list of demo Dashboards that embody qualities of great setups that are also using best practices for their category.

Gift cards/certificates

https://demo.fareharbor.com/giftcard/dashboard/settings/

Includes:

• Processes for building Gift Cards and Certificates
• Proper setup for both Gift Cards and Certificates

Resource setup

https://demo.fareharbor.com/resources/dashboard/settings/

Includes:

• Restricted to same Availability
• Restricted to same Item
• Restricted to same booking
• Restricted to none
• Negative Resources
• Openers – If one person books 9 am, 12 pm opens
• Openers – If 9 am is full, 12 pm opens

Resources examples

https://demo.fareharbor.com/resourceexamplesrentals/

Includes:

• Waterfalling resources
• Carriage tours
• 1 to 1
• Overlapping avails
• Weighted resources
• Opener
• Multi-day/ Item
• Time Based

Round Trip Flow

https://demo.fareharbor.com/roundtripferry/dashboard/settings/flows/

• Includes round trip transportation setup example

Speed and load times

https://demo.fareharbor.com/speedandloadtime/dashboard/bookings/grid/2018-03-26/

• Includes complex setups that can affect load times