Release Notes: What's New in 2024.2

Welcome to the 2024.2 What's New! Updates are organized into three sections:

• New: This section highlights the major feature updates for this release.
  • New: Hospitality
• Changed: Critical changes in behavior which you need to be aware of.
  • Event Management and Coordination
  • System Administration
• Improved: All the details about the rest of the enhancements to the software, grouped by module.
  • Permissions
  • Bookings
  • Financials
  • Meeting Attendees
  • Online Space Booking
  • API

New: Hospitality (Beta)

We are excited to announce the new Hospitality offering within Enterprise!

Enterprise Hospitality is a product for Group Salespeople to review convention/meeting space availability and hotel room availability for incoming leads and create contracts for prospective clients, all within a single system.

Our new Group Room Calendar offers a single view for reviewing available room nights, along with high-level space availability, allowing sales to quickly know if they can fulfill an RFP without looking at multiple pages or systems

Read on for more information! Enterprise Hospitality will be in beta through 2024. Please reach out to your primary Momentus contact for more information.

Group Property Configuration

Property accounts have a new Create Group Property Configuration window that allows users to manually populate the property’s Total Rooms, Group Ceiling, Budgeted ADR, Minimum Acceptable Rate, and Transient Rooms Booked. API support is available so users can automatically populate this information from their Property Management System.

Group Rooms Calendar

The new Group Rooms Calendar was created to display hotel room availability, existing group room sales events, and space availability overview all in a single calendar display. This allows Group Salespeople to have a single place to view space and hotel room availability, and send out a contract proposal to event organizers. The Group Rooms Calendar is based on the Booking Calendar, so will have similar functionality including the same export options: PDF, Excel, and Email.

Event Opportunities

On event opportunities, users can now:

• Enter the number of rooms requested by day and view the number of rooms agreed, blocked, forecasted, and picked up. This is all done in the new Guest Room Flow section.
• Enter revenues by department so they can enter a forecast and minimum for common items like space and food and beverage. You can also indicate if the revenue item has been contracted. This is done in the new Revenue section.
• Enter the meeting space requirements from the event organizer. This gives salespeople a standard location to capture this information rather than in notes or UDFs. This is done in the Meeting Space Requirements section.

In addition:

• Event Opportunities now support triple and quad rooms via the House Rate-Triple and House Rate-Quad fields. 
• Users can now set alternate dates and the Guest Room Flow section will automatically update. The new automation also will update the Guest Room Flow section when users change their Preferred Dates or Housing Dates.
• All new sections are supported in the API.

Note: There is a new Organization Parameter to indicate if the Event Opportunity updates the legacy “Flow” section or the new “Guest Room Flow” section. If using the legacy for CM 257, set value = Y if using legacy Flow. Otherwise, leave blank.

Event Room Blocks Breakout by Room Occupancy

The Room Block on an event has been enhanced to have the ability to break out Room Types by Room Occupancy. New “breakout” versions of Agreed/Blocked/Forecasted/Rate were added to the Room Types section, so that users can enter in a single value (like they used to) or they can enter in data for single/double/triple/quad separating each number with a slash /.

• If there is a flat level, enter the value (500)
• If there are single and double, enter 500/100, which indicates there are 500 singles and 100 doubles.
• If using single/double/triple/quad, enter 400/100/50/25, which indicates 400 singles, 100 doubles, 50 triples, 25 quads.

Note that the new fields will backfill the legacy fields, if they existed. This allows users to migrate to the new fields without breaking existing reports or integrations, giving them time to migrate existing data to the new fields.

Integration Support

API and External ID support was added to all necessary parts of this project for integration with Property Management Systems and Revenue Management Systems. These parts include:

• Room Blocks
• Room Types
• Event Opportunities
• Spaces
• Events

Changed

Event Management and Coordination

• Booking orders cannot be added to confidential events. Because the Bill-to Account and Contact are encrypted when the event is confidential, they cannot be properly applied to the booking order. To add a booking order, you will need to make the event public, add the order, and then make the event confidential again.
  • These articles have been updated to note this behavior:
    • Booking Orders
    • Confidential Events

System Administration

• The v19 Phrases option Find and Replace has been removed from the Dictionaries page. If there are phrases that need to be updated and you would normally use this workflow, please reach out to the Momentus Support Team.

Improved

Permissions

• Express users can now add and edit job bookings. Access to the Facility Maintenance or Jobs module is required. The Express User Functionality reference article has been updated.

Bookings

• On the Daily Bookings page, the space Venue field is now available as both a search filter and as a grid field/column.

Financials

• On the Purchasing Accrual Inquiry window the Accrual field has been added as a filter. This allows you to manage accrued versus non-accrued entries more easily.

• On the Accounts - Supplier window, the following fields have been added. These fields will allow you to more easily audit any Supplier bank account changes:
  • Bank Info Changed By
  • Bank Info Changed On
  • Bank Info Status
    • You are also able to filter on Bank Info Status to more easily see account in review versus approved.
  • Reviewed By
  • Reviewed On

• The Unbatched Vouchers window can now be added to dashboards as a gadget view. This allows you to monitor and more quickly process vouchers which needed to be batched. This is especially useful for AP Automation users, as all vouchers are created as unbatched.

Meeting Attendees

• On the Meeting Attendees page, you can now add the Event Requester account and contact as columns. These fields are used in the Book on Behalf Of feature to display who an event was booked for, so your front-office employees can inform the requestor when the visitor checks into the event. We have added this to Meeting Attendees.

Online Space Booking

• You can now control who has access to Online Space Booking Portals via Booking Roles. If an OSB configuration is assigned booking roles, only users with one of those roles will be able to access the portal.
  • When booking roles were released in 2024.1, access to the OSB was restricted in the user's account portal but it could still be reached via the direct URL. This is no longer possible.
• We've made some changes to better handle low-level space requests and prevent booking conflicts. Online Space Booking (OSB) will no longer show a space as available if there is a booking that is at or above the minimum conflict check status on the OSB configuration setting. Prior to this change a conflict would only be detected if both the existing booking and the new booking request were at or above the conflict check level in OSB.
  • The Conflict Check Status is set in the OSB configuration. We've updated the description for this field in Online Space Booking Configuration.
  • This change reverts the conflict checking changes that were made in 2023.1.
• There is now comprehensive tracking in the audit log for booking roles. With the new Booking Roles Transaction Class and expanded Transaction Types, users can now monitor changes with detailed audit log entries, capturing user actions and timestamps accurately. See Audit Log Tracking for instructions to activate these audit logs. Tracked changes are:
  • Transaction Class - Booking Roles
    • Transaction Types:
      • Add Booking Role
      • Booking Role Account Add/Delete
      • Booking Role Contact Add/Delete
      • Booking Role Space Booking Add/Delete
      • Booking Role Space Class Add/Delete
      • Delete Booking Role
  • Transaction Class - Booking Role Types
    • Transaction Types
      • Add Booking Role Type
      • Booking Role Type Description Changed
      • Delete Booking Role Type
  • Transaction Class - Space Classes
    • Transaction Types
      • Add Space Class
      • Delete Space Class
      • Space Class Description Changed
• Also see additions to the API below.
• Booking Roles and Space Classes has been updated with the above changes to booking roles.

API

This release includes API endpoints enhancing the functionality of our Online Space Booking (OSB) platform. We've developed a set of APIs specifically tailored for managing booking roles within the OSB ecosystem with a focus on empowering universities and corporate campuses and streamlining their event management processes. These endpoints will be used so that integrations can facilitate the automatic assignment of booking roles for students, faculty, and staff.

Key Capabilities:

• Create, Read, Update, and Delete Booking Roles: Manage booking roles for students, faculty, and staff with comprehensive CRUD operations.
• Create, Read, Update, and Delete Booking Role Types: Define and customize booking role types to suit the unique needs of your institution.
• Create, Read, Update, and Delete Booking Role Assignments: Assign booking roles to accounts, contacts, and online space booking portals.