Email forwarding

Whenever someone books something from your shop, this booking will appear in multiple places. You will find it in the disposition view, in the dashboard and in the order list. But all those require you to actually look into Rentware.

The best way to always be informed when someone books without looking into Rentware, is to simply send yourself a copy of the booking confirmation mail.

This mail contains all booking relevant data and since it’s a simple mail you can get it as a push notification on your phone.

To achieve that you can set up what we call a “channel” in the email forwarding settings.

Those channels can not only forward the booking confirmation mail, but all emails going out from your account.

You can set up multiple channels, for different use cases and within those channels determine for which items they should be triggered

Let’s look at 2 common examples:

General purpose channel

Most of our customers like to set up a channel, which triggers for every booking and forwards to you the confirmation mail, or cancellation mail.

This way you are always informed when a new booking is created, or when you, or one of your colleagues cancels a booking.

To set this up go into the email forwarding settings and click on “Add a new channel”:

You will then see a form, which contains the following inputs:

Channel name

This is simply for your orientation. You can for now just name it something like “Main channel”. We’ll get to why this is important in a bit.

Message Types

This is a multi-select field, which determines which emails a forwarded via this channel.

Since we’re now creating just a simple general purpose channel, we’ll select

Order Confirmation

and

Order Cancellation

Subject fields

For each of the message types you will have to define what subject the forwarded email should have.

For now let’s just say

New order and New cancellation.

Categories and items

Here you can click on edit and determine for which items this channel should trigger.

The logic here goes like this:

Whenever an email is sent out to a customer, the channel will check which items are in the cart of the booking to which the email belongs. If it contains one or multiple items that the channel is looking for, then it will trigger.

So to achieve our desired behaviour, we can make sure that all our main items, aka those that are bookable in the first booking step, have a category they share.

Your account already came with a “catch-all” tag, which for english accounts is “main object”, so let’s put that in.

Please note:

You need to make sure that all items in the first booking step actually have that tag / category, otherwise the channel may not trigger.

Recipients:

Here you can simply enter where to send this forwarded email.

This can either be your general purpose email address (usually something like info@yourbusiness.com), or you could create a special email address just for this purpose. That could be named something like bookings@yourbusiness.com.

This way your normal inbox is not filled with those forwarded mails.

Putting all that together, your channel will look something like this:

You can then save it via the green save button in the upper right hand corner.

Your channel will then already be active and start forwarding.

Use case specific channel

Now that we have a general purpose channel, we can create some more to handle more specific things.

One such example could be

Invoice forwarding for accounting purposes:

Some of our customers like to forward all invoices sent out from their Rentware account to some invoice@ email address. You can then send them to an accounting tool, or simply save locally just to have them collected in one place.

To achieve that you would set up a channel exactly the way we did above, but select the message type “Invoice”.

The same logic can be applied to things like protocol mails, if you want to collect them in one central place.

Another example could be

Item specific forwarding for specific services:

One thing some of our customers like to do is forward an email in case a specific upsell item is booked.

Maybe you are a car rental business and have a colleague named Dave who is responsible for handling premium insurances. You could have this colleague always look into all bookings and see if somebody booked the object “Premium insurance”, or you could simply say, that whenever this object is booked and only then, the booking confirmation mail should be forwarded to Dave.

To achieve that simply give the Premium insurance a tag like “Premium” and set up a channel to send the booking confirmation and cancellation to “Dave@yourbusiness.com”.