Asset reservations

For the helpdesk team

Reservations

The reservations surface is the booking system for pool assets — equipment that’s shared rather than permanently assigned. Cameras for a film club, iPads for a class set, AV trolleys, minibuses.

What you can reserve

Any asset in the register can be reserved if its category allows it. The category drives two things:

Whether the asset is bookable at all (the bookable flag on the category).
Whether reservations require approval (the requires_approval flag).

Categories that require approval (typically minibuses, expensive cameras) go through a pending → approved flow. Reservations on non-approval categories are approved immediately on creation.

Raising a reservation

From the reservations index, click New reservation:

Asset — picker filtered to bookable assets.
Requested for — usually you, but you can book for someone else (e.g. office staff booking the camera for a teacher).
Window — starts at / ends at, full datetime range.
Purpose — short free-text. Surfaces on the asset’s calendar.

Conflict detection runs as you set the window. If the asset’s already booked over part of your window, the form refuses with the conflicting reservation surfaced.

Statuses

Pending — submitted, awaiting approval (categories that require it).
Approved — approved or auto-confirmed (when the category does not require approval).
Rejected — declined by an approver. Window is released.
Active — the reservation window has started.
Returned — asset is back in the pool.
Cancelled — released by the requester or an agent. Window is free for others.

Gotchas

Conflict checks happen at this layer, not in the database. The DB intentionally doesn’t have an exclusion constraint so a future “shared resource” pattern (e.g. one of N cameras) can land without a schema migration.
Returned is a manual action — when the kit comes back, mark it returned. The system doesn’t infer return from a stocktake scan.
There is no automatic overdue status. Once the reservation window passes, an Active reservation stays active until manually marked Returned or Cancelled. The pool admin’s morning sweep usually catches these.