Good news! We have an Apple Mac in our office!

What does this mean to you? Keep reading to find out...

First, the good news. Our new system is cross-browser and cross-platform compatible. In fact, we encourage you to use a standards compliant browser like Firefox or Safari to run the new system – it will perform much faster than on Internet Explorer.

Second, even better news. The Beta version of our new software is being opened to all of our current customers! The instructions on how to get your hands on it are at the bottom of this page, but before you go there, please take the time to read this post as it outlines what changes we have made so far and what is to come between now and the date your company goes live with the new release.

I will not bore you with every single feature and function, but I will do my best to highlight the most important ones and let you discover the rest on your own or through trainings and tutorials that you will receive before going live.

To make it easier for you to understand all the changes, I will cover every module going from left – My Office – to right – Files.

In the new My Office section you can:
  • Create unlimited rental agreements in plain text or HTML format.
  •  Create unlimited SMS templates.
  •  Mange user’s security by restricting their access by date ranges, days of the week, times of the day, IP addresses and even certain modules of the system.
  •  Grade your drivers by their experience and create very advanced pay structures.
  •  Color code your Vehicle Types and specific cars.
  • Store unlimited pick-up instructions for airports.
  • Have full control over your entire rate table by using a number of pre-set rate types.
  • Create an unlimited number of flat, multiplier (e.g. per mile, per passenger, etc.) or percentage (e.g. gratuities, taxes, surcharges, etc.) rates. We have designed the new rate management system to handle over 140 different rate combinations. So if your state implements a new tax rule or if decide to create a new line item for a specifc customer, you won't have to send anything to the Wish List - just go to My Office > Rate Management and set it up yourself.
  •  Create Promotional rates that are only valid for certain promotional codes, time periods, service types or even airport codes.
  • Create Miscellaneous fees to help you up-sell your customers on certain add-on features. For example, a Wedding package (promo) could have add-on options like “Champaign” or “red carpet”, which normally are not part of your rate structure, but with the ability to tie these add-ons to the Wedding promo, they can be offered to customers and added to the reservation at the time of booking.
 The new Accounts section:
 
  • Allows for Booking Contacts to be added to each account. Booking Contacts can be shared by multiple passengers within the same company and each passenger can have a number of Booking Contacts.
  • Gives you the ability to store a number of custom rate structures for every Billing Contact or every Passenger.
  • Allows of for stored credit cards to be moved from one account to another.
  • Checks for duplicate account entries and warns you if another person with the same name already exists.
The new Quote management system:
 
  • Allows you to create HTML templates with image file attachments. You can now enhance your quote responses with images of cars, special occasions and customize the look with fonts and colors of your preference.
 
The new Calendar:
  • Can be viewed in Month, Week, Work Week and Day format.
  • Will allow you to add non-reservation events such as your personal appointments.
  • Setup recurring patterns by date ranges, days of the week, weeks of the year, and so on.
  • Can be sorted by Vehicle Types, Cars, Drivers and more.
 
With new Reservation screen:
  • You can select Billing Contacts, Passengers or Booking Contacts by either typing in their names or by selecting them from sortable dialogs.
  • You can add entries into Group Names, Occasions, Referral Sources and other fields on the fly.
  • You can type in pick-up date and time in just about any format and the system will format it for you according to your company preferences.
  • You can move routing items around by simply dragging & dropping them on the screen.
  • Most importantly, you can apply rates from the Rates & Zones, Vehicle Types, Accounts or Promotional rate tables. All with just a few mouse clicks. The system automatically narrows down the rate set based on the reservation criteria. For example, if a reservation is being booked for an Airport Arrival on a Sedan from DFW to Dallas, TX, the Fixed rates tab will only display rates that originate in DFW and terminate in Dallas, TX for the SED vehicle type. The Promo tab will only display promos that are tied to the Airport Arrival service type. And if the Account is selected, it will show any matching stored account rates.
  • You can copy reservations daily, weekly, monthly, yearly; for a specific date or for any date range; for days of the week or days of the month, etc.
  • You can link multiple reservations together.
  • You can change the currency on the fly and will soon be able to check real-time conversion rates.
  • The city & state will auto populate when you enter a billing zip code for the credit card.
The Dispatch grid received the most significant facelift and deserves the most attention.

As you will see the interface was changed to include more intuitive, more advanced criteria selectors. For example, you can filter your grid to show only the In-House jobs or only the Farm-Outs. You can set to display a select number of statuses, drivers, cars or vehicle types.

The Grid can now be customized by each user individually. So each dispatcher can set their own number or order of fields as well as date and time formats.You can quickly find trips within the grid by typing in the keywords in the “Quick Search Within Grid” box. For example, if you needed to filter your daily grid by all trips from or to JFK, you could just type it in the box and the grid will be filtered as you type.

You can now sort the gird by every field, access frequently used features from a context (right-click) menu and preview trip's route on a mini map directly from the Grid.

The start and end times of the Grid can now be customized. For example, if you would like for your day to be displayed from 2:00 AM to 1:59 AM the following day, you could do that by setting up your user preferences.

The Map tab is a brand new feature that is currently exclusive to Limo Anywhere.It displays the selected day’s trips on the map and allows you to see the starting and ending points of each reservation, their estimated pick-up and drop-off times and actual driving time estimates. This feature will help the dispatchers to determine the location of each car and driver and assign reservations more efficiently.

The Graph tab is also a new feature that allows dispatchers to visually determine the duration of every reservation and assign it to a car or a driver by simply dragging & dropping it to their column. You can also add non-reservation events (e.g. car is in carwash after a certain job) to the Graph screen and choose to display trip durations based on Garage Out and Garage In times.

The new Billing and Payments sections were broken down into Receivables and Payables, to better represent the nature of each section. You can now create invoices (and later statements) without having to settle reservations first.

Two other new features that were introduced are Memos and Files. The Memos section is something you can use to post company-wide memos and the Files feature will allow you to store and manage your company files to later use them in HTML templates, attach them to certain email responses and so on.

Other features to be released within the next couple of weeks are:

  • Ability to email just about anything you can print.
  • Add Prefixes and Suffixes to reservations.
  • Add printable confirmations, trip sheets and other documents to the “To Be Printed” queue and print them all at once later.
  • View customer’s monthly, quarterly or yearly spending from within their account.
  • Create itemized and more detailed SMS templates.
  • And much, much more.
The Online Reservation System is currently in its final stages of development and is planned to be released around the end of November.

In the meantime, as we continue to work on and release new features over the next few weeks, we would like to ask you to familiarize yourself with the new system as much as you can on your own and also set some time aside for training later next month. We will be holding group training sessions starting November 23rd.

We appreciate you taking the time to read this post. To request your individual Beta account, please send us an email to GiveMeBeta@limoanywhere.com. Immediately upon receipt of your request, we will provide you with access to our public demo site and then once your individual account is setup, another email will follow with your company specific login information.

Thanks and feel free to contact us with any questions.

Max Paltsev.