For Jupiter Dive Center owner Gerry Carroll, it all started when he met Capt. Gary Mace, creator of Scubaocity, while looking at a boat Gary was selling. That boat became the Republic VII at JDC, and shortly thereafter in 2010, Gerry was introduced to the online reservation system.
Having one of the largest charter boat operations in South Florida, Gerry was no stranger to the complexities involved in managing thousands of reservations a year with no online presence. And with technology rapidly expanding back then with every person eventually owning a cell phone, he knew he needed to be more accessible. So when Gary told him about his online reservation system, he wanted in.
As Gerry puts it, "having Scubaocity was a game changer from the start. It allowed our customers the ability to make a reservation 24/7 and it also freed up our shop personnel, allowing them to focus on other tasks."
It wasn't a perfect solution though as it didn't connect to his point of sale software, thus creating extra work to ring up the reservation and any store purchases.
About two years into using Scubaocity, Gerry came to the EncomPos Software booth at the DEMA trade show and decided to upgrade his point of sale software. We had been working with Gary on connecting Scubaocity to EncomPos for about a year already and he saw where we were going with it.
After a year or more of perfecting the sync between the two, Gerry's biggest hurdle had been overcome. "Everything at our front counter is seamless. No more having staff jump from one software to another, which has reduced the possibility for errors, and best of all, we have all of our customer information in one place."
We haven't stopped improving and enhancing the sync software for him even now, 10 years later. "The next upgrade is the one we are most looking forward to - online payment processing."
Gary had introduced online payments from Blue Pay about 3 years ago, but it had no connection to EncomPos, so it required 2 merchant accounts, 2 batches to close and 2 service fees. And for reservations made over the phone, Gerry wanted to securely take credit cards and use them later without hand written notes or stored on his PC or worse, emailed to him.
"Once this is completed we will have a seamless system for online reservations which allow me to take on line payments through the same merchant account, transfer all of the online transactions to EncomPos for one blanket closeout for all systems while sharing credit card tokens across platforms. And finally I'll be able to refund someone at the point of sale from an online reservation without needing their card again. We are really looking forward to this last piece to reduce the labor involved."
And this year will be that year. After taking over Scubaocity from Gary in 2020, we have been working hard to put that last piece in place. Coming in 2021, the reservation system will have options to activate Live Pay (take payment immediately for a reservation), collect a secure token for later charging and refunding, or just take a reservation without any credit card information collected.
And from Gerry's perspective, "at that point we will have a completely integrated reservation system with our point of sale, and we feel this will put EncomPos Software and Scubaocity way ahead of the competition. For us, it's all about efficiency."
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