The GRATIS ‘Outbox’ is a sophisticated communication facility where you can retrieve, check, authorise and transmit documents and associated attachments.

To open, click once on Intranet Viewer in the menu at the top right-hand side of your home page:

Select Office: if you manage multiple offices within GRATIS, choose ALL or the Office that you wish to work with from the drop-down pick-list.

Select User: you can select which consultant bookings you would like to see from this drop-down picklist.

Select Booking Type: you can select from Accommodation, Conference, Supplier or ALL booking types here; the default is ALL.

Document Status: the default is set to Awaiting Approval – depending on your set-up and permissions you can approve and send from here.

You can set up a quality control approvals system by amending permissions in the employee module. 

 Your manager/supervisor should be set to all so that they can approve documents from the list, colleagues permissions may be set so that they can only transmit approved documents from the Awaiting Sending section.

Employee Admin

To restrict an employee’s right from being able to email documents without approval but to still be able to view, delete and send after approval, change their permissions in the Employee Admin module.  Go to the permissions tab and in the listing ‘Intranet Viewer’ tick and untick the boxes in the following order (T is a tick and F is unticked):  T T F F T

Supervisors/Managers

In the Intranet Viewer, the supervisor should sort the Document Status by Awaiting Approval

Now they can view all documents the consultants have left waiting for approval.

View the document and if satisfied it is correct to email click ‘Approve’ this will then queue to the consultant to email it.  To send their own documents click ‘Approve & Email’.

If the document is incorrect, click ‘Reject’ and a box will appear where you can send a message to the consultant stating why it has been rejected and reject both the client and venue copies as you would usually.

Consultants/Colleagues

In the Intranet Viewer, the consultant should sort the Document Status by Awaiting Sending

All documents that have been approved by the supervisor are now available to email by clicking ‘Email’

Links: click once on the USER LOG hyperlink to display all activities relating to document approval & transmission for that day.

Refresh: Click once on the REFRESH command button to update your screen view

Reject Selected: used in combination with the Selected check-box facility on the right column; choose which document(s) you wish to remove by ticking the appropriate box or boxes and clicking once on the REJECT SELECTED command button.

The sub-menu provides information on the documents:

Ref: your GRATIS booking reference

Type: denotes if an Accommodation, Conference or Supplier booking

Status: shows whether Provisional, Confirmed, Amended, Cancelled or Released

Arrival: displays the arrival date

Consultant: who is the ‘owner’ of the booking

Document Created: the date the document was created

Recipient: who the document has been created for

Document: this column displays all documents to be approved or sent relating to the booking; click once on the hyperlink to open the document

Choose your activity by clicking once on the appropriate blue command button at the top of the document

Refresh: to ensure that you are looking at the latest version of the document

Print/Fax: if you wish to print, PDF or fax the document click once and follow the instructions on the pop-up printer dialogue box.

Preview e-mail: default (recommended) is checked

Approve & e-mail: for use when no supervisor/manager quality controls are in place

Approve: for supervisor/manager to approve the document, a colleague will then retrieve from the documents Awaiting Sending list and click on send.

If  'preview' is selected the details are displayed:

TIP – you can choose to send all related e-mails eg the venue/supplier copy as well as this client copy by ticking the APPROVE & SEND ALL OTHER DOCUMENTS check box at the side of the subject line.

Reject: if you decide not to send the document, clicking once on the REJECT command button will delete from the list.  If you are a supervisor/manager you can at this stage send a message to the originating colleague with the reasons for rejection – put a tick in the send message to consultant box and enter the text as required

Date & Time: displays when the document was approved for sending

View: click on the HISTORY hyperlink to view all actions for that enquiry

TIP - it is much easier to locate information when the intranet viewer is managed on a regular basis, by rejecting unrequired documents, ensuring that all others are either transmitted or deleted from the system. 

Understanding the statuses in the Outbox

What ‘Awaiting Approval’ and ‘Ready to Send’ mean?

Awaiting Approval 1

Ready to Send 2

Approving and Sending All Current Documents 3?

When viewing the documents listed in your Outbox you will see there is a drop-down menu to display which documents are displayed:

This document is designed as a brief overview of which documents will be shown for each status and how different actions performed on a document will change this.

Awaiting Approval

When you choose ‘Awaiting Approval’ then any documents that have been created within a booking that has not yet been approved will be shown in this list; these documents will be sorted by the date and time the document was created on the system with the newest documents shown first.

To remove a document from the ‘Awaiting Approval’ list you would need to go into the document by clicking on the document’s title under the ‘Document’ column and choosing either ‘Approve + Email’ or ‘Approve’ from the options as such:

Ready to Send

Documents that have been approved, using the ‘Approve’ option, as shown above, will show in this view and will remain in this list until they are sent via the Outbox by again clicking on the document title under the ‘Document’ column and choosing ‘Email’ as such:

Documents that had previously been sent via the ‘Approve + Email’ option will not show in this list as they have already been sent via the Outbox.

Approving and Sending All Current Documents

If you would like to send all documents related to the current document version for a given booking you can check the ‘Approve & send all documents for this document version’ option when using the ‘Approve & Email’ option for a document:

Using this option will remove all related documents (such as client proposals, venue options and venue release reports) from the Outbox - though records of all documents sent can always be found in the History tab of the related booking.