Are You Using These 3 Powerful Booking Features in NetSuite OpenAir?

NetSuite OpenAir is a powerful PSA system that provides a multitude of features for maintaining your bookings as well as providing insight into your utilization and project staffing. Surprisingly, some of its best tools are frequently under-utilized.

3 Under-utilized Booking Features in NetSuite OpenAir

Don’t waste time doing things manually when these powerful features might simplify your resource management data entry and maintenance.

1. Set Up Repeat Bookings

A really great feature in NetSuite OpenAir is the ability to create Repeat Bookings. This feature is fairly simple to use, yet for some reason, is often forgotten and ignored. Repeat Bookings is a very fast way to set up multiple bookings at once without a lot of fuss.

OpenAir allows you to create as many as 104 copies of the booking over a specific period of time. Each repeated booking copies all the data from the original booking, such as resource, project, and hours, and this information can be adjusted in the repeated bookings.

The most important feature of Repeat Bookings is, of course, the time frame. The software provides the ability to set the frequency and time period of the multiple bookings. You can even skip time periods if necessary.

2. Leverage the New Advanced Booking Worksheet

The Advanced Booking Worksheet is a newer feature in OpenAir that was launched in October 2016. The UI has been modernized and improved to include color coding, and it is designed to help review consolidating bookings and notes. This is an extremely helpful feature to identify when overbookings are accidentally occurring. Other UI improvements include inline editing, a contextual menu, and the ability to set job codes at the booking level instead of the task level.

The Advanced Booking Worksheet also offers the ability to customize the output based on filtering. As the number of bookings reaches the hundreds and thousands, these filtering options truly make a difference.

3. Try the Booking Planner

And finally, a breakout feature that introduced drag and drop capabilities in NetSuite OpenAir is the Booking Planner. When it was first released in May 2014, it covered basic functional needs. In each subsequent software release, however, the Booking Planner has been updated and improved, becoming one of the more versatile and useful tools in the system.

Features of the Booking Planner include powerful inline editing tools to create, edit, and delete bookings, as well as a way to lock down columns to improve navigation. Like the Advanced Booking Worksheet, the Booking Planner also has a contextual menu that allows for the creation and editing of bookings. The Planner offers a drag-and-drop interface for creating a booking, re-assigning a booking, and rescheduling a booking across users and timeframes.

One of the most powerful aspect of the Booking Planner is Bulk Actions. This allows you to perform mass updates on the project, perhaps to adjust the overall timeframe.

Get the Most Out of NetSuite OpenAir Booking

Take some extra time to review the new and improved booking features in NetSuite OpenAir, and you might just find that they will help you do a lot more in less time.

Are you getting the most out of your OpenAir system? Schedule a 30-minute complimentary review.