Hi, I'm Greg Lindberg, a co-owner with Karen, Jon, and Laurie of Lakeside and Fridens Ro. I've often felt that cabin owners should be able to find out when our cabins are rented without having to call Kim, and we should be able monitor our rental income. As a very experienced software developer I know that this is a solveable problem. My first thought was that we needed a new system, and some of you may remember that I made a little proposal to that effect six or seven years ago. Kim made it clear that she is happy with the current reservation system which runs as an Excel application on the office computer.

I had a "lightbulb" moment in January of 2020, when it occurred to me that we owners could access reservation data quite easily if we simply pulled it out of the existing Excel system. We could have the best of both worlds -- Kim could continue to use the system she knows, and owners could have their own window into the data. The great thing is that it would place no new burden, whatsoever, on Kim. I hoped to explore it further with Kim when I was at Lakeside for a couple of weeks that winter, but she wasn't available to discuss it. I briefly mentioned this idea at last year's owner's meeting and there seemed to be quite a bit of interest in it.

I have years of experience designing and implementing complex automated processes. This one would be simple, but requires that the Sugar Beach Excel file have a row of data for each reservation. I would need access to the Excel file to know if it has that now or could easily be added.

The Details

I would install a tiny program on the Sugar Beach computer and use Windows Task Scheduler (an internal timer) to schedule it to run twice a day. Whenever the program executes, it will do the following:

1. Connect with the Excel database and copy the reservation data.
2. Connect with the database on the web server and insert the reservation data into that database.

When the program executes, it will not interfere with the Excel reservation system and Kim will not even be aware of it. If you would like to see more on this and a test-of-concept, watch the youtube video I posted in March 2020: How we could pull data from the current system

The other parts needed to make it work: the database on the web server and the interface for owners, have already been developed and are working (as shown by this demo).

In addition to being a convenience for cabin owners (and for Kim, who would no longer have to answer questions about the reservation calendar), it would have other benefits:

1. It would ensure long-term, secure off-site storage of valuable Sugar Beach business data.
2. It would provide owners a window into an opaque system that currently can only be accessed by the Sugar Beach manager. Having more eyes on the data would help guard against mistakes or fraud. We all have respect for Kim's integrity but future managers may not be as trustworthy.

All the reservation data you will be seeing is FAKE for demo purposes!

Click "Login" and use one of the demo username/password combinations.

Check out the "View Reservation Calendar" and "View Reports" pages. (View Reports has a little "How to" video.)

Thanks for visiting! If you wish, you can send me feedback or suggestions by clicking on "Send Suggestions/Report Problems."