Vik Rent Car Official Documentation

From this task you can manage the Prices for the vehicles.
Each Price has a name, an optional attribute and an optional tax rate.
An Attribute is a characteristic of the Price that can be used when inserting the fares and it can change daily.

Example:

Price Name: Standard Insurance
Price Attribute: Miles Included
Tax Rate: (select the tax rate that should affect this price)
Then click on Save for creating the Price. It's always possible to edit the Price by clicking on the checkbox next to it and then on the Edit button from the toolbar.

In the example above, the page Fares Table will ask to specify a rental cost for each car for the type of price called "Standard Insurance", and to enter a value for each day of rent for the attribute "Miles Included", like 100 per day. If you don't need to set additional information for the attributes, then you can just leave it empty and enter only the name for your type of price.

If you would like to set different rental costs for each car, like to offer the possibility of choosing between various types of insurance, or different cancellation policies, then you should create one Type of Price for each price-choice you would like to offer. A common setup of the Types of Price is to offer two types of insurance (price), one for a "basic insurance" and another for a more "flexible insurance" (Damage/Collision Waiver etc..).

From this task you can manage all the locations for Pickup and Drop Off where your offices are located.

To create a new location click on the new button from the toolbar and fill in the details of the location.

You will be asked for an optional latitude and longitude, these values will be used by the location map in the front site to place a marker on the google map. You can also set an Opening Time for this location that can be different from the other locations or from the global Store Opening Time.

Additionally, it is also possible to define a Suggested Time, as well as to override the Opening Time on some days of the week. If your location is open 24 hours, for example, but you would like the drop down menu to pre-select 9AM, then you should set 9AM as "suggested time". With the Override Opening Time function, you can set a different opening time for specific days of the week, for example, on Sunday rather than being opened 24 hours, you could define the actual opening time for pick up and drop off.

Time Breaks: Within the function "Override Opening Time" you can add time breaks each weekday at the Location level.

Each location can also have some Closing Days. The closing days can be single dates of the year, or some specific week days, like "every Sunday".

Notice: You will need to sign up to Google Maps and recieve your own API key to insert in the back-end for this function to work properly. This will solve any possible "Oops! Something went wrong" problems.

The Booking Restrictions are rules that can be set up to define some limits for the orders on some dates of the year. For example, to force a minimum number of days of rent on some dates of the year, you can create a Restriction. The same thing works if only for some dates you want to set a maximum number of days of rental.

The Restrictions were built by following the OpenTravel standards, and so some terms may sound similar to the hotel industry, because that's actually where they come from. For example, terms like "CTA" and "CTD" stand respectively for "Closed to Arrival" and "Closed to Departure". You should enable these parameters in your Restrictions if you would like to disable pick up (arrival) and/or drop off (departure) on some week days in your restriction dates.

Thanks to the Restrictions you could also force the pick up on a specific combination of week days, or define a minimum length for the rental with a multiplier, like 7 days, 14, 21 etc..

Please notice that only one restriction can be applied on some specific dates, and a Restriction that sets just a 1 day as minimum rental period is NOT considered as a valid restriction according to the OpenTravel standards. That's because 1 day is already supposed to be the minimum duration of the rental.

From this task you can manage the categories to which cars belong. Categories are useful when the users are searching for cars because they can filter the results by selecting the category from the search form.
You will only be asked for the category name and for an optional description that will be shown in the view type Cars List filtered by a category.

From this task you can manage the options that the users may want to add to their rental orders. Options can be anything, a GPS, a baby seat, an insurance etc.
Options have a Name, an optional description, a cost, an optional tax rate, an optional image and three parameters:
daily cost: the price will be multiplied for the days of rental;
selectable quantity: if this parameter is on the user will be asked for the units desired, otherwise a checkbox will be displayed;
maximum cost: in case the option price is multiplied by the days of rental or the units, it is possible to set a maximum cost that the option can reach.
You can also force the option to be always selected, this could be useful in case you need to make the user pay for some service and list this service in the order summary as a separated cost from the rental fare.

From this task you can manage the characteristics of the vehicles. Characteristics have a name, an optional icon and a text to be displayed in the front site.

If the configuration setting for using the Characteristics as search filter is enabled, users will be able to tick or untick certain Characteristics to filter the search results. This is supported only in page displayed after making a search.

The Characteristics must be assigned to each vehicle from their Edit page or they won't be visible on the Views "Cars List", "Car Details", "Search Results", "Result Pricing".

At this point, you are supposed to have created the locations, the prices, the options and the categories.
By clicking on New, you can create a car. You will be asked to provide some information:
the name, the main image, optionally more images to create an image gallery, the category to which the car belongs, optionally a description test.

The locations where pickup is available and the locations where the drop off is available: These values can be multiple, click on the location desired when holding the ctrl button. It is also possible to assign some of the characteristics to the vehicle by clicking on the checkbox next to them. The same thing works for the options, this way you can only assign some of the characteristics and options created before, not all of them.

Another important feature of the vehicle is the units field. This value will be considered when the system is checking the availability of the cars depending on the orders received.

It is also possible to add import remote iCal calendars containing reservations to sync the availability for the vehicle.

After clicking on Save, you will be redirected to the fares-creation page.
In this task you can create the fares for each existing type of price. In order to insert the fares, you have to put the number of days/hours and the daily cost for each type of price.
Example:
You have two types of price: standard insurance and full insurance. By putting from 1 to 10 days, €50 per day for the standard insurance and €60 per day for the full insurance, the system will automatically multiply the prices by the days obtaining €500 for 10 days of rental- standard insurance, €600 for 10 days of rental-full insurance.

Refer to the Fares section to find out more about the pricing syste

This is the pricing table of each vehicle. Rates are expressed by duration of rental in Days, Hours or Extra Hours.

Here you are supposed to specify your base rental costs for each car, and to define a rental cost for each Type of Price previously configured. You will be able to modify the base rental costs on some seasons, holidays, weekends and dates of the year by creating some Special Prices.

Please notice that cars with no rental costs defined in the page Fares Table will not be available for booking. Also, even if you are working with hourly rentals only, the cost for 1 day of rent should always be defined, unless you work with daily rentals always greater than 1 day. In fact, if no rates are defined for the duration of the rental requested, then the cars will not be available in the search results.

The Special Prices are rules to lower or increase the rental costs for some cars on some dates or weekdays of the year.

By clicking on New, the task will ask you to provide a Starting and an Ending Date for creating a Season.
These values are not required, you can just select one or more days of the week to create a Special Price that will be applied every week of the year. Use a Season and select one or more days of the week to combine the filters.
In case you are creating a Season, you can decide to apply the Special Price only in case the Pickup Date is after the begin of the Season. Some companies use this policy.
It is also possible to keep the rate of the first day of rental so for example, in a rental of 7 days where only the first 4 days are affected by your Special Price "High Season", you can decide to consider the other 3 days as "High Season". This policy could be used by your company.
The special Price Name is a value that will never be shown in the front site, only in the administrator section for management purposes.
The type can be Charge or Discount and a value, percentage or absolute will be applied to the rental daily fare.
The discount or charge value can be overwritten depending on the days of rental, for example, you can decrease the value for 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 days of rental. The default value will be applied in case there are no overrides for the selected days of rental.
It's required to select one or more Vehicles in order to apply the Special Price. The location filter is not required and can be left as Any.
When creating Special Prices with percentage values, it is possible to obtain costs with decimals. Use the function "Round to Integer" to never have prices with decimals.

From this task, you can create charges to be added to the daily rental fare depending on the pickup and drop off locations chosen by the user.

You just have to select the pickup and the drop off location, insert the cost to be added to the rental fare, decide whether the cost has to be multiplied by the days of rental and optionally assign this cost to a tax rate.
Flag the Option "Apply if the locations are Inverted" and, in case the Drop Off Location is chosen as the Pickup and the Pickup Location of this fee is chosen as the Drop Off, the fee will be applied as well.
The value can be overwritten depending on the days of rental, for example you can lower the fee for 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 days of rental.

One-way Fee: if you choose this option, this fee will include any possible combination of pickup location different from the drop-off location.

Some Car Rental Companies apply charges depending on the time of Pickup and/or Drop Off. This function will let you do exactly this thing. Give the Fee a name and define the Time Interval to which you would like to apply a charge. For non-consecutive times just create multiple fees. For example, say that the Station/Location Milan Airport applies a charge from 1AM to 5AM: you will be able to define a charge in case the customer picks up the car at that time and/or if the customer returns the car at that time. It is also possible in the last example, to define a maximum charge to be applied in case the fee is applied for both pick up and drop off.
These Fees can be different depending on the Car and, of course, depending on the Location.

From this task you can manage all the orders received and also the reservations created from the administrator. A list is showed and by clicking on the date of the order you can see all the details.
From this task is also possible to set an order to Confirmed if it is still Pending. In this case a confirmation email will be sent to the customer and the unit of the vehicle will be considered as booked for the dates of the order.

You can use various filters and sorting options to find a specific rental order, or a group of orders that require your attention.

Is possible to register the status of the rental for each reservation. If the date of the check-in has started, you can update the status of this rental into "STARTED" mode. This will mean that the customer has picked-up his car regularly. If the date of the check-out has started and the customer has returned the car, you can update the status into "TERMINATED" If the date of the check-in has started but the customer did not come to pick the car, you can update the status into "NO SHOW" You have a text area to add any notes about the updates.

Every rental order can have 3 different statuses: Stand-by, Confirmed and Cancelled. Whenever you remove a non-cancelled order, this will take the status Cancelled. If you remove an order with status Cancelled, this will be completely removed from the database, and it won't be visible anymore in the Orders List.

The availability for the cars on some specific dates is only reduced when the status of the order is Confirmed. This means that if you change the status of an order from Confirmed to Cancelled, by removing it, the availability for this car will be increased by 1 unit on the previously booked dates.

Orders with Stand-by status can keep the cars booked as "locked" for an amount of minutes defined in the Configuration page (through the setting "Waiting Minutes for the Payment"). However, once these minutes have expired, the car will be available again unless the status of these orders has changed to Confirmed in the meantime.
Removing a Stand-by order with an active "lock" on a specific car for some dates will not free up the availability. You should rather "unlock" the car from the bottom of the page Dashboard, where all the locked records will be displayed.
Please notice that a "locked" car will not be visible in the availability calendars. For this reason, we suggest to keep the setting "Waiting Minutes for the Payment" to a low amount of time, the time required to complete a payment. Usually 15/20 minutes.

From this task you can have an Overview of the availability of each vehicle for the selected month. The view can be filtered by the next 12 months. The number inside the red cells shows the units that are booked for that day.

The page Calendar is useful to get an overview of the bookings of a certain car, as well as for registering walk-in customers or any kind of reservation received over the phone or offline. By creating a new reservation you will reduce the availability of a car on certain dates. The page Calendar also allows to Close a specific car on some dates. By closing a car, the system will book all the units of your car, by making them unavailable. This will generate a special "reservation" just meant to close the availability. The page is divided into two parts:
- Quick Reservation form: for lowering the availability or for registering some bookings that were not received from the website
- Availability Calendars: get a view of up to 12 months from today's date with the bookings and the availability of a car

With the Quick Reservation form you can register some bookings as well as stop the sales (close car) on some dates. If you are registering a booking for a walk-in customer then it is recommended to use the button Fill Custom Fields so that the system can retrieve the email address of the customer as well as the Nominative, the Country and the Phone Number. Instead, if you would like to close the car on some dates and stop the bookings, you should tick the checkbox "Close Car on these Dates". This action will create a special booking that will be displayed as "Car Closed" in the Order List page. For re-opening the car it is sufficient to remove this booking.

Customize Widgets

 @since 1.2.0 

Starting from version 1.2.0, the Dashboard of Vik Rent Car has a new look. It is divided in sections to host custom widgets. Clicking on the Customize Widgets button at the top-right of the page, you will open an edit side of the Dashboard. This interface will let you manage all the elements displayed in your Dashboard through Sections, Containers and Widgets.

You can add new Sections to better organize your elements, and arrange their position with drag and drop actions, and also add new Containers with a proper size to contain your widgets.

Four sizes are available for the containers:

• Full Width gives a 100% width to the container. Only one container of this type will fit in one row.
  
• Large gives the container a 75% width. Another small container could fit in the same row next to this size.
• Medium gives the container a 50% width. Another medium container could fit next to it, or even two small containers.
• Small gives the container a width of 25%. One row could fit up to 4 containers of this size.

This is an example of how the widget type "Reminders" looks like:

The coupon system allows you to create discounts that will be applied to the order total.
A coupon has:
A code that can be any letter or number including special characters.
The type can be permanent or gift, in the first case the discount will be always applied when this coupon is used. If the type is gift, the coupon can be used only once, after that it will be removed.
The discount can be a fixed value expressed in your currency or a percentage value.
It's also possible to apply some filters to the coupons:
The coupon can be used only for some vehicles or for all the vehicles.
You can restrict the date of usage of the coupon.
You can set a minimum order total in order to apply the discount.

The users will be asked to enter the coupon code in the order summary page.

To know more about the Cron Jobs function read our Knowledge Base section

In the "Advanced" menu you will find the function "Statistics Tracking".
The function “Statistics Tracking” will calculate the conversion rates, that is the relation between visitors and confirmed orders. It will track the traffic of Visitors, Customers and the Referrals. A Referral is the web source that brings you visitors on your website. You will be able to filter the tracking results for a specific range of date, type of date, country and Referrals. Thanks to this function, you can also create custom tracking campaigns: click on the “Tracking Settings” button to specify your tracking parameter.

The Reports framework is a part of the system that can be extended through the creation of apposite PHP Classes that extend the parent interface. Reports are useful to obtain financial statistics as well as to produce calculations of tax/levy. By default, Vik Rent Car is installed with several types of Reports to generate and/or export data: Revenue, Rate Plans Revenue, Occupancy Ranking and Top Countries.
In the screenshot below you can see the calculation of the Occupancy Report obtained on a specific range of dates for the rental orders received.

The Configuration of VikRentCar is divided into 5 tabs.

From this task you can manage the methods of payment for your website. Paypal, Offline Credit Card and Bank Transfer are pre-installed but disabled after the installation.
The methods of payment affect the order status that can be Pending or Confirmed. You can find a parameter called "Auto-Set Order to Confirmed" on each payment option. Make sure this is disabled for those payment processors that require a server validation otherwise, if enabled, when selecting that payment option the system will apply the status Confirmed automatically without showing any payment form.
In case of all the methods of payment are disabled, each order received is considered by the system as Confirmed and the user will not be asked to select any method of payment.
Paypal is a method of payment that processes a server response, to enable this payment you have to publish it and then from its Parameters you have to provide the Account for Payments (usually your email address).

Bank Transfer instead doesn't need to validate any external response.
By clicking on the title of the method of payment, the edit/configuration task will be opened

The Payment Name is the title showed in the front site during the order confirmation when the user has to select a method of payment.
The File Class is a php file that is executed by VikRentCar to validate the payment, do not change this unless you are creating a new method of payment.
Take a look at the documentation about creating a custom method of payment for VikRentCar.

A method of payment can apply a charge or a discount to the total order. From the setting Charge/Discount you can enter an amount, percentage or value that will be added/deducted from the order total. This can be useful if you want to give your clients a discounts if they are paying by credit card.

From this task you can manage all the fields that the users will have to fill in before saving the order.
During the first installation of VikRentCar, some fields are created by the program but it's always possible to manage these fields.
The field types are:

• Text - the user will have to fill in an input text field
• TextArea - a text area with more rows will be shown
• Select - a select menu is shown in this case, you can create all the select options from the same task
• Checkbox - a checkbox field will be shown
• Separator - this field is not an input field but just a text separator. It can be used for dividing the Driver's Information from the Billing Information.
  If the text of this field is longer than 30 chars, a different style will be applied to it. Some people use for writing extra information.

The field name is the label that will be next to the input field or the text of the separator.
If your website is multilanguage, the label should be a definition inside the .ini language file of each language that you have.
For example, the field Address should have a label like ORD_ADDRESS and each .ini file of VikRentCar that you have should contain a row like this:
ORD_ADDRESS="Address"
Take a look at the Knowledge Base for furter information about languages and .PO .MO files.
A field can be required or not, in this case the system will check that the user provided something for that information.
If the field type is Text and the setting Is Email is On, that email will be used to send the order email.
Another important setting of the fields is the Popup Link. This function is usually used when the field type is Checkbox and the user has to accept something, the Terms and Conditions for example. The popup link is a page that is ope

If the Configuration setting for attaching the PDF to the order eMail is enabled or if the PDF generation is requested from the Administrator panel, Order Details page, VikRentCar parses all the information of the Order and then invokes a template file that gives the layout and style to the PDF that can be used as Invoice and/or Contract.
The template file is the following:
/wp-content/plugins/vikrentcar/site/helpers/pdf_tmpl.php
VikRentCar will replace all the special directives inside the brakets {}. You can move them or place them inside any html tag that you want. All the occurrencies of echo JText::_('VRC...'); are language definitions that can change depending on the language in use. Make sure that those language definitions are available in the .po file for the front-site and for the administrator section or you might have problems when generating the PDF from the Administrator section.
You can add pages to the PDF by using the code {vrc_add_pdf_page}. By default, this template file renders the first page with the order details and then, after adding another page, generates a sample text with some information entered by the user (or the Administrator) with the Custom Fields. By using the code {customfield 2} the program will replace it with the Custom Field ID 2 which is the Name by default. Check the Custom Fields page to see the IDs of the fields.

With the Distinctive Features the administrators can create certain "fields" for each unit available of a Car. For example, if the company has 2 units of the same Car "Mini Countryman", it is possible to specify some particular features of each unit. This is useful to distinguish one unit from another and for car rental companies, the first thing to identify one car should be the License Plate.
By default, the system will add 4 Distinctive Features (empty) for each unit of the Car: License Plate, Mileage, Fuel-In, Next Service. Important: the first Distinctive Feature will be the one displayed on any Confirmed Booking in the back-end, to assign a certain unit of a vehicle to a booking. For this reason the first feature of each unit should be something that will let you distinguish it from another.
Multi-language tip: when you are adding custom features, remember that you can also use a language definition of your .ini language file. For example, if you would like to create a custom feature for each unit of your car called "Colour", you can either put Coulour in the input text field or a language definition like VRC_FEATURE_COLOUR. Then you would simply have to put that language definition at the bottom of your Translation .INI File like this:
VRC_FEATURE_COLOUR="Colour"
Then copy that language definition on any other tanslation file and translate it.
The screen shot below shows how you can assign the car with the License Plate EN826SH to one booking because it was not assigned to any other booking on those dates:

The Distinctive Features are useful for management purposes first of all but also for the PDF

With this useful function you can keep the logs of your cars updated by marking the exact point of the vehicle where there is any kind of damage to be reported: a scratch, a dent or a ding for example.

Click on any point of the car where you would like to report a damage and add a description of it:

The default map of the car is just an image file that you can replace with your own PNG photo. The file is the following:
/wp-content/plugins/vikrentcar/site/helpers/car_damages/car_inspection.png
While the red-mark showing the damage is another PNG file that you could replace with your own (you can also use a smaller or bigger image):
/wp-content/plugins/vikrentcar/admin/resources/damage_mark.png
IMPORTANT: the PHP-GD Libraries are required in order to generate the PNG file with the damages of your Car.
Once you have added or removed the damages for the specific unit of the car, remember to click the Save button to apply the changes. You should do this operation every time that car is returned/dropped off to keep its status updated.

This is a function available only from the back-end, only if you have assigned a specific car to the booking.

This is an example of how the Check-in PDF will look like:

The check-in PDF file is generated through a PHP-Template-File that you can customize however you want. The file is the following:
/wp-content/plugins/vikrentcar/site/helpers/checkin_pdf_tmpl.php
If you open that file you will find some useful PHP-Comments that will tell you what special-syntax tags are allowed to print some of the Distinctive Features and the Image containing the Damage Logs. Notice the damages can be displayed in 3 different ways: Damage Marks Only, Numbered Damage Marks or Numbered Damage Marks + Explanation of the Damage. This is up to you, if you would like to have the details of each damage or keep a number of the damage as reference. You can set this up from the Configuration page by changing the setting Car Damages in Check-in PDF.