This guide will help you create a new or edit already existing price structures.
Start by bringing up the SmartLaunch server window from the system tray by simply clicking the SmartLaunch icon. The server should by default be locked, press the Unlock button and enter the administrator username and password.
The system tray
After the server is unlocked, press the Settings button, click the Financial Setupsection and select the Pricing Structures option. On the right side of the window you will now see that Smartlaunch has already setup a list of the most common price structures.
Edit a Price Structure
We will start by editing two of the price structures that almost every store uses, the guest and member structures. The first price structures are Member prices, select it from the list and click the Edit button to change the price settings for that price group.
There are two different price plans, Simple and Advanced. The Simple price plan has the same price per hour, regardless of how many you buy. The Advanced price plan lets you specify if the hourly rate should decrease as the customer buys more time.
Setup a Basic Price Plan
Let’s start by setting up a Simple price plan in the first tab: 1. Basic Rate. There are five input fields that you need to edit: Startup fee, Minimum Price, Basic Hourly Rate and finally Round Every and Round after.
- Startup fee – If you want to charge your customers an amount for every time they purchase time, specify this in the Startup fee input field. If not, leave it empty to only charge the customers for the hourly rate.
- Minimum Price – Set the amount of money you want this price group to have as a minimum amount of money they can deposit to their account. This can be used for guests for instance; a customer that just wants to surf for a few minutes should not have a Minimum Price. But on the other hand, you don’t want to make your staff have to make very small transactions to the accounts, so you specify a Minimum Price for the Members.
- Basic Hourly Rate – is obvious but the most important of the five input fields. This is where you specify how much you want to charge per hour for customers of this price group.
- Round Every / After – This lets you specify a number of minutes before the charging. For instance if you set the Round every to 15 and Round after to 4, the customer will be charged after the following number of minutes has been played: 4, 19, 34, 49 and so forth.
Advanced Pricing Setup
To setup your advanced price plan, click the Use advanced pricing button to disable the Simple price plan and enable the Add and Remove buttons (+/-) for advanced pricing. The advanced price list works by letting you add checkpoints where you want your hourly price to go up or down, for example you can set a checkpoint so that the second hour becomes cheaper, and the third even cheaper.
To do this, press the plus button on the right side. This will open up a new window where you can specify at which minute you want the price to change. The first entry in the list should of course begin after the first minute. Similar to adding a Startup fee in a Basic price plan, you can charge an amount for every checkpoint by entering it into the Add to bill input field.
In the New hourly rate input field you enter how much you want to charge the customer until the next checkpoint.
In the bottom of the window, you can click the Loop back to checkbox if you are done adding checkpoints and want to restart the counting from the first checkpoint when the time exceeds the last checkpoint. For example, if your first hour costs 30, the second 20 and the third 10, you can add a loop back after the third hour so that the fourth hour the customer buys will cost 90 (30+20+10+30).
When you are done adding all of your checkpoints and the loop back (optional), press the Next button to continue.
Price Adjustments
The second tab, Price Adjustments, in the Price Settings window is for changing your hourly rate, depending on which day of the week it is or what time it is. This can for example be useful for stores that have a lot of customers during evenings but less during the day, and want to attract more customers by offering a lower price during the day.
Press the Add button to enter a new price adjustment.
Start by setting a start and end time for this price adjustment, and select which days of the week this price adjustment should be valid by clicking the checkboxes next to those days you want. The Price plan on the right side works exactly like in the Basic Rate tab, select which type of Price plan you want to use for the period of time you have specified, and fill in the correct fields. When you are done, click the OK button to add the new price adjustment.
The new price adjustment will look something similar to the image above, depending on the times you specified. To delete a price adjustment, select it from the list and click the Edit button and when the window opens up you will find the Delete button in the bottom left corner.
When you are done adding all the price adjustments, click the Next button to continue to the last step.
Testing
Click on the third tab in the Price Settings window called Test. If you just want to test your Basic price, press the Calculate Price button to open up a window showing a list with exactly how much money is added to the bill per minute. If you want to test your advanced price or price adjustments settings, specify the Start Time and how long the time Period should be. At any time you can press the Back button to edit your settings before you test it again.
The following screencast demonstrates how Pricing Structures can be setup in Smartlaunch.
