• Hourly inventory booking and payment management.
• PDF invoices for improved print formatting and archiving.
• Discount codes for campaign tracking.
• Updated field editor to customize your booking page.
• Tiered pricing for multiple price points (eg Adult / Child pricing).
• New rule updates and rate setup.
• Improved Paypal Standard payment flow that includes your customized booking fields.
• New dashboard layout with better sorting of Bookings.
• Plenty of interface updates and improved in-line documentation.

Checkfront is constantly innovating its services to help our customers succeed. Here are some of the near future features on the Development Road Map:

• International module - allows for localization into any language
• New Payment processors including Quickbooks™, and Versapay™.
• Additional integrations into Google Apps™.
• Have a feature request? Be sure and share it in our request forum.

We appreciate and value your business. Look for the Checkfront community newsletter later in September and send us your "Why we like Checkfront?" stories and testimonials if you'd like to be featured.

News

Price increase September 1st (new accounts only)

To help support our growing product requirements and infrastructure, our subscriptions will be going up by 10% on September 1st. This does not apply to existing customers. If you’d like to lock into the existing price and have yet to upgrade, please do so before Sept 1st!

We're hiring!

Checkfront is always expanding its team and is constantly recruiting. Join a team with a passion for quality, customer satisfaction and personal growth. Checkfront offers a dynamic distributed culture with many unique, innovative people in many countries.

Current openings:

• Sales/ Support
• Developer
• Book keeper, office administration

For more information on opportunities with Checkfront see our careers section.

SPF records tell mail servers (such as gmail and yahoo) that Checkfront is able to to send mail for your domain, and that the from address hasn't been forged. SPF records are not mandatory, but do help ensure mail deliver-ability.

A SPF record is a DNS TXT entry and should be added where you manage your domain. * Note: an improperly configured SPF record can result in lost mail. Please make sure someone with a good understanding of DNS configures your SPF record.

The SPF record for Checkfront should reflect the following:


v=spf1 include:mail.checkfront.net ~all


For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework and http://www.openspf.org/.

We have re-packaged our Soho account to include more support and features at a low price. We believe offering a discounted rate for small operators will help us provide a better overall product.

Existing active beta customers can continue to use the free account for up to 6 months. We do encourage you to upgrade to the new paid version of the Soho account before then as it includes priority support and will see more features added to it in the coming months.

What is an active beta customer? If you were using Checkfront on your website to take bookings April 27th 2010 (the end of out beta), that is you.

The Soho account is available for a low fee of $19.95 a month USD (see plans for more currencies). We have further reduced this up to 30% off for our beta customers.

To upgrade your account, click the subscribe link when logged into your Checkfront account. Please note the discounted offer expires June 5th.

As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Selected by the C100, in partnership with the Consulate General of Canada, 48 hours in the Valley brings Canadians startups together with companies, and decision makers in Silicon Valley.

We are excited to have the opportunity to go down and take part in this event. We've had great early feedback from our customers and look forward to showing off what we have.

We'll also be participating in the Plug and Play EXPO on May 20th, so wish us luck!

If you are attending either of these events, please drop us a note so we can say hello.

For a full list of companies participating, see http://www.thec100.org/48hrs/.

Best,
-Jason

Checkfront™ is a feature-rich online booking system that allows businesses to manage their inventories, centralize reservations, and process payments. It can be used to manage accommodation, events, rentals and professional service bookings.

“Centralized reservation and booking systems have traditionally been expensive and cumbersome technologies to navigate.” says Jason Morehouse, Co-Founder. “We are firm advocates of cloud computing and believe the Saas (Software-as-a-service) model will revolutionize the industry. Our core focus has been on building a powerful, ‘usable’ platform that is accessible to a broad range of businesses."

"We’ve had a very positive beta campaign with over 1500 business participating. Admittedly, the product we started out building is different than what we’ve arrived at, but we really let our beta customers help define it.”

Checkfront integrates into popular CMS products including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Movable Type. It was recently selected for inclusion in the Google App Marketeplace and Facebook application directory. Unlike existing solutions, Checkfront focuses on keeping customers on the merchant's website, while providing a powerful and secure back-office solution for managing customers, inventory and reporting.

As a fully managed solution, Checkfront includes automated updates, backups and industry leading security on a high speed, high availability network. It has support for 24 currencies, multiple payment gateways and languages.

Checkfront is a feature-rich Online Booking System that allows businesses to manage their inventories, centralize reservations, and process payments. It can be used to manage accommodation, events, rentals and professional services.

"Centralized reservation and booking systems have traditionally been cumbersome and expensive technologies, simply out of reach to most businesses." says Jason Morehouse, company CTO. "We are firm advocates of cloud computing and believe it will revolutionize the online booking industry. Allowing our customers to leverage the power of Google Apps is a natural fit with our model".

Checkfront integrates seamlessly into Google Apps, allowing organizations to easily manage their accounts and access privileges. It connects with the Google calendar to set booking and availability dates, as well as allowing reports and analytics to be viewed directly in Google Docs.

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than 2 million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/appsmarketplace.

Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

Albeit a little over due, we now have a support forum. Feel free to ask as many questions as you like there. We're also really keen to hear what features you'd like to see implemented in Checkfront moving forward, and of course, current that features aren't working the way you'd like.

If you have a bug report or account related questions, you should still create a ticket in the support area of your Checkfront Management Console (CMC).

As we are building up our documentation, we'll try and make the most recent information available there.

As these are public forums, remember never to give our your password, or publish information about your account there.

To participate in the forum, you must create a forum account. For security reasons, this is not the same as your Checkfront / CMC account and it is advised you use a different password.

See you there.

http://www.checkfront.com/community/

In this scenario, we're setting up an accommodation based business, adding some basic system settings, and integrating the customer front end booking with our WordPress plugin.

Voila! Ready for business.

(This isn't intended to be a tutorial.)

You can now embed a Checkfront booking window virtually anywhere using our new Dropbox. The Checkfront Dropbox is a compact, standards compliant XHTML / Ajax widget that embeds a real time interactive booking window into any web page — no programming required.

The Dropbox will adapt to your website style and layout, giving your users a truly integrated experience, while still giving you a powerful and secure booking process.

You can find your Dropbox widget by logging into your Checkfront Management Console and going to Extend / Integrate / Dropbox.

Here is a live demo of the Dropbox in action:

(If you are viewing this via an aggregator, see here)

Your feedback is appreciated.

ENJOY!

We understand that network reliability is essential to your business. Once fully migrated, European customers should see (even) faster response times when using Checkfront.

The new hosting facility is located in London England at Telecity Group’s state-of-the-art Powergate facility (tour) with peering to many well connected providers including Deutsche Telekom, Interoute, Level3, PCCW-BTN, Telia and Tiscali.

Existing European customers will be migrated from the US to the new UK data center within the coming days. Please note there should be little to no interruption in service, however everyone will be given a 24 hour notice before the move is made. If you are in Europe but would like to continue to be hosted out of the US, please file a support ticket.

Note: you can determine what data center you are in by logging into your Checkfront console and going to Manage / System.

For customers located within the United Kingdom, you'll soon notice your url change from yourid.checkfront.com to yourid.checkfront.co.uk. Your checkfront.com domain will forward indefinitely and no changes should be necessary on your end (exept for maybe your bookmarks!).

If you have any questions feel free to contact us.