Fore! Reservations FAQ

Live Support Chat – Live Support Chat allows us to efficiently handle many quick simple questions and provides you a convenient way to communicate with a support agent for those type of questions. It is available Monday - Friday 8:00AM - 5:00PM CST.

Online Videos – Under the 'Watch' section on our website we have instructional videos, both for managers and general staff. Many courses find that showing the Counter Series Videos to all employees is a good refresher for the season.

E-mail Support – For non-urgent issues, e-mail us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . If received before 6:00PM CST we will reply on the same day.

Phone Support – We offer phone support between 5:00AM and 11:00PM CT, 365 days a year. To reach customer support call 630-789-9784 x3.

Marketing Support – Our marketing support team is available to assist you with any Fore! Marketing, e-mail marketing or Internet Dashboard questions. Marketing support is available Monday - Friday 8:00AM - 5:00PM CST. To contact marketing support e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call 630-789-9784 x2.

If at any point you have a concern with the cusotmer support your course is receiving, please contact the Director of Customer Support, Kirk Burnett, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  If there is anything we can do to further assist in your facility’s success please let us know.

Fore! Reservations understands the lengthy hours of the golf business and knows that you often need help outside of "normal" business hours when you are busy serving your customers. Therefore, we provide live telephone cusotmer support 365 days a year between the hours of 5:00 AM and 11:00 PM CT. We have a full office staff to assist every day between 7:00 AM and 6:00 PM CT with cellular emergency support before and after. Our call back times vary depending on the season, with spring being the busiest time. We receive calls from newly installed customers asking learning curve procedure questions and from grizzled veterans who are calling for a refresher on those once a year activites they do to prepare for the season.

To avoid the inefficiencies and frustrations of playing phone tag, we have upgraded our phone system to include a queue system. If no one is immediately available, you will be put into a hold queue to give us an opportunity to finish our current call and answer yours. If your issue is less critical, after a short hold you can leave a message that we will return the same day. Otherwise you can continue to hold for the next available support agent. Any voicemail left at the end of the 10 minute hold time is prioritized above other general voicemails and will receive a returned call promptly, in most cases within an hour. Please leave us a quick synopsis of the issue and a phone number where you can be reached as the most urgent matters receive priority.

For procedural support, our supoprt philospohy in general is the "teach a man to fish" concept. While we do not mind being on the phone to help and coach you, we prefer that you perform the steps so that you can learn more about the software and be better equipped to help yourself should you need to repeat this procedure again. For example, we would love to help you learn how to create your own schedule that is customized for your season. To utilize your facility, you may have to be continually making changes throughout the season. Having the skills to do this without needing to call support can save you time and effort.

For things that are one time events, we are more interactive. Commonly this is when dealing with hardware installation or bugs in the software. For example, we do not expect you to learn how to install a receipt printer or other peripheral. We would be glad to teach you if you want to learn, but otherwise we will perform those tasks for you.

We utilize a product call LogMeIn Rescue where by we can view and/or control your computer. This is by invitation only so there are no security risks. For those one time events we often do this so that we can quickly complete those tasks. We may also ask to remote in for procedural support, but prefer to only watch so that we can better explain how to complete the procedure.

We track all of our customer interactions in our own local CRM (Customer Relations Management) database. This allows our staff to be versatile. If your issue was not resolved on the first call, you do not have to wait for that representative to become available to work on it. Another representative can look at the documentation and pick right up where the other person left off. By tracking solutions we are creating a knowledgebase which will help us solve the same or similar issue in the future, either for you or at another facility.

Lastly with our development team we utilize a bug tracking software. This allows us to document issues with the softare, track fixes and testing and overal document the progress of the software.   

Upgrades are included as part of your lease agreement. There is no additional cost to upgrade. We highly recommend that every facility upgrade to our latest version to take advantage of both new features and any bug fixes. Our support staff is well versed in the latest versions and can often give better support on the most current version because their experience is more recent than supporting previous versions. Usually, the upgrade does not take much time and can be downloaded from our Internet servers.

When known in advance, Fore! Reservations will attempt to notify customers for any abnormal interruption of service. Maintenance or upgrades are planned with consideration of both the least amount of interruption to the golf course and the most opportunity for an efficient and successful upgrade. For example, upgrades are often not planned for weekend nights because the hosting company support is not of prime quality at that time. If our developers would run into a problem that would require support, the issue may not be able to be resolved in a timely manner, resulting in a longer than expected interruption for the golf courses. Thus, we may often choose to do planned outages at a less convenient time for the golf course, but at a time where we know support is much better should there be an issue, i.e. on the fringes of the day. The end result is a more efficient upgrade and less interruption to the course.

In the event of unanticipated interruption of our services, we make a judgment call on whether or not to send notifications to our customer base. Often, the interruption is not long and once fixed, Fore! Internet will reconnect itself automatically. Therefore, making a mass communication about an outage does not help the golf course as the notice is usually read after the issue is resolved and therefore causes some confusion to the golf course i.e. the cliché yelling fire in a theater. Certainly, if the interruption is going to be for any substantial length of time, we do communicate the issue to the customer with our planned course of action and expectation of resolution. If you have any concerns about any outage, you can always call customer support.

Fore! Reservations has not allowed WI-FI in the past because the unreliability of the network resulting in potential packet loss was known to instigate database corruptions on our Access product, Fore! Reservations 2009 and earlier. Fore! Reservations 2010 and 2011 is a blend of Access and SQL Express. Because it is a blend and still depended on Access, we assumed that it would still not be reliable on WI-FI and did not take valuable development time to test the results. 

Fore! Reservations 2012 will be a full .Net, SQL Express product. Based on that architecture, we ANTICIPATE that it will operate better in a WI-FI environment. This has not been tested, is only speculation and cannot be guaranteed. We look forward to testing this upon release of Fore! Reservations 2012.

For a full explanation of backups please see our Black Box Backup Whitepaper.

To meet PCI Security standards, Fore! Reservations 2011 includes a 15 minute inactivity logout feature if you are either an Admin user and/or you have the ability to view full credit card data.  In 'Fore! Reservations' | 'File' | 'Setup' | 'Users', if your user has either 'Admin' and/or 'CC Security' enabled this 15 minute inactivity logout feature will apply to you.  If you are logged into Fore! Reservations and are inactive for 15 minutes, a 1 minute countdown timer will appear.  You can click the 'Cancel' button to prevent Fore! Reservations from logging you out automatically.  However, if the full minute counts down you will be kicked back to the Fore! Reservations login screen.  This new addition is intended to function as a security feature to prevent others from performing administrative functions or viewing full credit card data while you are away from your computer.

If you wish to have 'Admin' and/or 'CC Security' functionality for your user but do not want to deal with this inactivity logout feature, our suggested workaround is to create two users for yourself -- your primary user with' Admin' and/or 'CC Security' not enabled and a secondary user with 'Admin' and/or 'CC Security' enabled.  Then, you can simply log in as this secondary admin user when you wish to perform administrative tasks or view full credit card data.

• 1. Log into Fore! Reservations,
• 2. Go to Help | About Fore! Reservations,

• 3. The version year and build is listed at the top of the window. In this picture, the version year is Fore! Reservations 2011 and the version build is 14.8.58.

Sort

• 1. Open a spreadsheet and enter any parameters, then refresh the data,
• 2. Click the column heading of the column you want to sort by, in our case 'Awards',
• 3. Go to Data | Sort,
• 4. The spreadsheet will now be highlighted and the Sort window will be displayed,

• 5. Make sure the Header row is selected and then select the column you want to sort by in the Sort by pull-down, in our case 'Awards',
• 6. Click OK and the spreadsheet is now sorted by the new column.

Subtotals

• 1. Open a spreadsheet and enter any parameters, in our case we will run the ResMade.xls for the month of March,
• 2. Refresh the data on the spreadsheet,
• 3. Sort the data on the spreadsheet if needed, in our case we will sort the spreadsheet by ReservationMadeDate,
• 4. Click on a column heading and go to Data | Subtotals,

• 5. In the Subtotal window choose the options of your choice. In our case we want to find the sum of the quantity reserved each day. Select ReservationMadeDate from the At each change in pull-down, Sum from the Use function pull-down, and only check QuantityReserved in the Add subtotal to list. Because the spreadsheet is sorted by ReservationMadeDate, each time the date changes a subtotal will be inserted specifying the sum of the QuantityReserved column for that day. A grand total will be inserted at the end of the spreadsheet.

• 6. Click OK and the the subtotals are inserted according to the options chosen.

Customer type is used for driving rates to the shopping cart. They are mutually exclusive, meaning that one customer can have only one customer type. For example they are either a Daily Fee, 7 Day Resident Passholder, 5 Day Resident Passholder, 7 Day Non Resident Passholder, or 5 Day Resident Passholder. Depending on what customer type to which they are associated will drive the appropriate fee to the shopping cart. 

Customer categories are used to further segregate the customer list. Most commonly they are used for email marketing or in the billing wizard. Customer categories are not mutually exclusive, one cusotmer can have an unlimited number of customer categories. For example you may want to do mailing to the ABC League and an XYZ League. Theoretically, once customer could belong to both of those leagues. Likewise, you may want to do create categoreis for the Handicap system, Locker rentals, or Range Plans. Again a customer could belong to none, one, two or all of those categories. 

The customer notes are associated witht he customer record. They are viewed in the customer's profile.

The reservation notes are associated to the reservation. They will move with the reservation if the time is modified. Reservation notes can be printed in a report. 

The detail notes are for the specific time slot and do not move with the reservation. A red flag serves next to the time serves as a visual indication that this time has a detail note. The note can be viewed in a bubble by holding the mouse over the time or by right clicking and choosing Details.  

For a tee time that is checking in, right click on the time and select Details. Enter the receipt number in the field and pull the appropriate fee from the pull down based on the transaction from the point of sale.

This will color the customer on the scheudle giving visual reference that they have checked in.

At then end the day, you can run the Fee Summary report to reconcile end of day numbers with the point of sale.