Courts, pools and prices

The Courts & pools screen is where the physical place is described. A facility belongs to one sport at one branch — “Badminton hall”, “Turf A”, “Main pool” — and holds the bookable units inside it: courts, turfs, tables, lanes.

Courts inside a facility are numbered copies of each other: Court 1, Court 2, Court 3, same hours, same prices. If one court is special — a different price, different hours, a show court — it is its own facility, not a court inside this one. That is the only way to give it its own rules.

Every facility has a short code, used on invoices and in conversation. Choose it once; it never changes. Renaming an identifier quietly rewrites history nobody can see, so FrontCourt does not offer to.

A bookable unit is one of two kinds, and the kind is fixed when it is created:

• Exclusive — one booking at a time. A badminton court, a turf, a table. This is the default.
• Capacity-shared — many people at once, up to a limit. A pool lane holding eight swimmers, a gym floor with forty places. Bookings take places, and the calendar shows occupancy as 3/8 rather than as overlapping blocks.

Capacity can grow any time. It cannot shrink below what is already booked — six swimmers sold on a lane cannot become a lane of two.

Hours are set per facility, per weekday, in the club’s own time. A day can hold more than one window — a morning session and an evening session with a break between — and two windows on the same day may not overlap.

Hours are replaced, not merged. To stop opening on Sundays, save the week without a Sunday. Availability on the booking desk begins and ends exactly at these hours; a court with no hours is a court nobody can book.

Each facility has a rate card: the prices, the GST rate if the club is registered, whether the price includes tax, and the cancellation terms. On the card are rate rules, and a rule is an answer to three questions:

• Who — member or non-member. Someone with an active membership covering this sport pays the member price automatically; you never choose it by hand.
• When — weekday, weekend, or any day.
• What time — a peak band, or all day.

When several rules could apply, the one with the highest priority wins. The price the desk shows before you confirm is computed by the same arithmetic that charges it, so what was quoted and what was billed cannot differ.

A gym or pool that people use on membership can set the member price to zero. The desk then shows “Free with membership” and raises no invoice for members.

Terms live on the rate card with the prices: free cancellation outside a cut-off (say 24 hours before), and a percentage kept inside it. The desk quotes the fee before anyone confirms a cancellation, using the same rule that will charge it. A new rate card carries the terms forward with the prices.

A closure — resurfacing, a private event, a broken light — is entered from the facility and shows on the calendar as a blocked slot, competing for the time exactly as a booking would. A closure is refused while something is already booked in it, and the message names the booking, because somebody has to be told.

Retiring a court altogether is soft: it disappears from the desk but every booking, invoice and journal line it ever produced stays readable. It is refused while anything is still scheduled there, it needs a reason, and only an Owner can do it.

Next: Taking bookings →