Resources Overview, Resource Types and Rate Cards

A resource is anything an event needs that you either supply from your own inventory or source from someone else: a truck, a lift, a console, a labor call. The resource system is how BackOps describes those things once, prices them, and carries them from an advance request through procurement to fulfillment.

Why the Resource System Matters

Without a shared definition, every kind of truck or console gets its own private list of fields. The 15 ft, 16 ft and 26 ft box trucks each carry a separate "Registration Expiration", nothing guarantees they match, and nobody can ask which registrations expire this month across the whole fleet. Pricing drifts the same way, because each copy of a rate gets edited on its own.

The resource system fixes this by defining things once and reusing them. A fleet manager defines "Registration Expiration" one time and places it on every truck type. A coordinator prices a type once and every request for it picks up that price.

How the Resource System Works

Four concepts carry most of the model.

Resource types describe a kind of thing, such as "Box Truck" or "Line Array". A type sets how the thing is tracked, which attributes it carries, and what it costs. A type can also have variants, for example a 15 ft, 16 ft and 26 ft version of the same truck.

Attributes are the fields a type carries. They live in one library for the organization and are placed onto types through sections, the same way crew attributes work. Because one attribute serves every type that uses it, you can compare it across types. Each placement also says where the attribute applies, which is covered in Resource Types and Attributes.

Rate cards hold what a type costs and what you charge for it. Each type owns its own rate cards. See Rate Cards.

Composite resource types are types assembled from other types. A semi is a tractor, a trailer and a driver. See Composite Resource Types.

Organization Resources and Event Resources

The same resource system exists at two levels. Your organization keeps the master library of attributes and types. An event can use those types and attributes, and an event admin can also build event-only ones. Types and attributes move between the two levels, so work you do in the organization library is available to every event.