The setup wizard, step by step
The first time you sign in you land in the setup wizard. It walks you through the smallest amount of setup that lets you take a booking. It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.
A progress list on the left shows where you are. You can go back to a finished step at any time; steps you have already completed are not asked again.
1. Account
Your name, email address and language. The language you pick here is the language the portal speaks to you in — your colleagues each choose their own.
2. Company details
The legal details of your business: company name, address, country, VAT number, Chamber of Commerce number, phone number and a billing email address.
These are used in three places, so they are worth getting right: on the invoices ReservationBay sends you, on the contracts and quotes you generate for your customers, and to work out your VAT treatment.
3. Plan
Choose your subscription package. There are three, and Flex is pre-selected because it has no monthly fee — if you simply continue, you land on the package that costs nothing per month.
| Plan | Per month | Commission per booking |
|---|---|---|
| Flex | € 0 | 2.95 % |
| Growth | € 49 | 1.5 % |
| Pro | € 149 | 0 % |
Every plan carries every feature and unlimited locations, categories and objects. You are not buying features here, only a different balance between a monthly fee and a commission. You can switch in either direction later from Settings. See Plans and pricing.
4. Location
Your first rental location — the place customers actually collect from.
We have already filled this in with your company address, so most businesses only need to set their opening hours and continue. If you rent from a different address than your office, use Different address? Edit details and correct it.
Opening hours start pre-filled at 09:00–17:00 on weekdays, so you can take a booking the moment the wizard finishes. Adjust them here or later under Locations.
5. Category
Your first rental category — one kind of thing you rent, not one item.
You give it a name ("City bikes"), pick the branch it belongs to (bicycles, boats, campervans, party & events, AV & camera, …), write a short description, and set a base price with its interval (per hour, per day, per week, per month). If you take a deposit, switch it on and enter the amount per item.
The branch you pick matters: it decides what the next step suggests, and it pre-fills sensible rules on the category — a campervan category starts with a minimum rental period and a changeover day, an AV category starts by requiring a serial number on every object. Everything it fills in can be changed.
6. Features
The Tailor to your business step. ReservationBay has a set of optional features — reviews, contracts and e-signatures, bundles, vouchers, discount codes, reports, and so on — and this step ticks the ones your branch usually needs.
A boat or scooter rental is nudged towards waivers, signed documents and signatures. A bike shop is nudged towards vouchers and reviews. Turn on what you want; anything you leave off simply never appears in your menu, and you can change your mind at any time under Settings → Features.
7. Objects
Your actual stock. Pick the location and category, then say how many you want to create and what to call them ("City bike"), and ReservationBay creates that many numbered objects in one go.
You can create up to 500 at a time. Details per object — reference, frame number, barcode, colour, size — are added later under Resources; the wizard only needs the count so your availability is real.
8. Finished
That is the setup. From here you go into the portal, where you can add more locations, more categories and more objects, and enter your first booking.
Payment setup is deliberately not part of it. You can run your whole business at the counter without ever taking an online payment. When you do want to take money online, see Getting verified — that is a separate check with its own documents.
Coming back to an unfinished wizard
If you stop halfway, the portal shows a banner ("Still needed — complete onboarding") on every page until you finish. Click it to return to where you left off.