Hotel / Lodge / Resort

For a hotel, lodge or resort. Guests arrive against a booking or off the street, hold a room for a few nights, run up extras on a folio, and settle one bill on the way out. A restaurant, if you run one, sits beside it on the same system.

Set up before your first guest

Do these in order. The owner (or a Manager / Owner login) does all of them.

1. Pick what you run Setup > Hotel Setup > Hotel Settings, Features. A new property starts lean: a twelve-room lodge can leave rates, the task sheet and deposits off. Every switch can be turned on later.
2. Set the day and the tax on the same page: check-in and check-out times under The Day, early check-in and late check-out charges, what a cancellation or no-show keeps, and the GST slabs.
3. Add your room types Setup > Hotel Setup > Room Types, each with its rack rate.
4. Add every room under Rooms & Floors: number, type and floor. Blocks and Amenities are optional lists a room can point at.
5. Build the rate card (only with Seasonal & Weekend Rates on) under Tariff Plans, and Rate Rules if you use them. Without it, a night is the room type's rack rate.
6. Price your extras: laundry, minibar and other services under Services & Rates, food under Menu Items when you run an outlet.
7. Create a login for each person by the job they do (see Who signs in).
8. Run one test stay end to end: book a room, check in, post an extra, check out and settle. Cancel the test booking afterwards.

How the work flows

A stay moves from desk to room to cashier. Each step says who does it and what prints.

The whole journey on one page:

flowchart TD
    A[New Booking
guest · dates · room type] --> B[(Reservation held)]
    B --> C[Arrival day: Front Desk]
    W[Walk-in: Check In] --> C
    C --> D[Room assigned · guests listed
advance taken if any]
    D --> DR[Who is in the room:
adult/child, ID, a photo]
    DR --> E[(In house)]
    E --> F[Extras posted to the folio
food · laundry · minibar]
    E --> G[Room move or upgrade
recorded with its date]
    E --> H[Check out]
    F --> H
    G --> H
    H --> I[Bill built from the stay
a line per room segment plus extras]
    I --> J[Folio Settlement
adjust · discount · take payment]
    J --> K[(Settled · room freed for housekeeping)]

Who signs in

Give every person their own login. Adding a user in a hotel asks what the person does first. That choice decides the screen they open on, their phone's bottom bar and the switches they start with. Any switch can be changed afterwards.

1. Open the user form Setup > Hotel Setup > Users > Add (also under Settings > Users).
2. Pick the seat in Does (Front Desk, Cashier, Housekeeping...) and link the person's staff contact.
3. Set the login: user name and password (email on a cloud business).
4. Review the switches the seat ticked, add or remove any, and save.

The seat is kept on the login because a night auditor and a front-desk clerk can hold identical switches and still want opposite first screens. Re-picking a seat on an existing person does not change their switches; Reset to role defaults does, and warns first. See Users, Roles & Permissions.

Where it is in the app

A hotel opens on its own home screen, laid out by the seat the person signs in at. Each group shows only the entries this seat is granted and this property has switched on; a group left empty does not appear.

On a computer: the menu bar

Across the top: the seat’s own screen, the Dashboard, then one menu per area. There is no separate New menu: a booking or walk-in starts from a room on the Room Board or a night on the Availability Calendar. Room Move and Extend Stay are on the stay itself, where the guest and the dates are already known.

On a phone or tablet: the side menu and the bottom bar

The bottom bar carries the screens each seat works all shift. A screen on the bar is not repeated in the side menu.

Screens

Dashboard

The morning read: who is arriving and departing today, rooms occupied against rooms available, what is still to be collected, and the extras posted since yesterday.

Front Desk

The working screen. Find a booking or a guest, check in, assign a room, post an advance, move a room, add folio charges and check out. Everything about one stay is reachable from its row.

On the Check-in Queue each arrival carries a readiness tag, so the desk knows before the guest reaches the counter whether they can walk straight in: Allot a room (the booking holds a room type, no key yet), Room out of order, Being cleaned or Room not clean, or Room ready. The tags follow housekeeping: refresh the list and a room cleaned since shows ready.

A booking that has a guest or a room picked is not lost to a stray tap. Going back, pressing Escape or clicking outside the form asks Discard this booking? first; only Discard throws the rooms and rates away.

Checking out

Check Out on a stay shows the bill before the room is closed: room rent for the nights stayed, extra guests and beds, folio extras not yet billed, and the late check-out fee if leaving now would be charged one (the same rule the check-out then posts). Below the total it applies the advance and shows either the balance to collect or the refund due to the guest. A card hold is shown but never subtracted — it is not money taken, so release or capture it when you settle. A group check-out asks only about key cards: each room is settled as its own bill.

Night Audit

Closing a business date freezes that night's figures. Before you close, the page lists what the morning shift would otherwise find: guests past their departure (still checked in), arrivals that never came (confirmed and not checked in) and departed, not billed (checked out with the folio open). Each open item has an Open button to the queue it is worked from, and the list refreshes when you come back. You may still close with items open — the app asks first, and they are recorded as that date's exceptions. On a cloud-only install the first two are counted by the server when the date closes, so only the unbilled count shows beforehand.

Group bookings

New Booking holds one card per room: Add another room adds a line with its own occupancy and its own register, so a family split across two doubles and a couple next door are booked exactly as they are travelling rather than as identical copies of each other. Each room is checked in on its own, because the keys are handed out one at a time.

Every room also carries its own money. Setup on a room card opens that room alone: its rate, a discount in percent or rupees, its own check-in and check-out dates, its meal plan, how many adults and children are in it, and any bed or other charge you are adding at the desk. So two doubles and a suite — one of them discounted, one of them leaving a day early — is still a single booking on a single bill. The rate and dates on the booking itself are just the starting point every new room copies; once you have set a room up by hand, changing them leaves that room alone.

A bed or other charge you add here is put on that room's bill as its own line, so you can take it off again later. Choose Fixed for a one-off or Per Night to charge it for every night of the stay.

At check-out the group card lists every room with a tick beside it. Leave them all ticked to settle the whole party on one invoice, or untick the rooms that are staying on and settle only the ones leaving today — the rest keep their own bills open. Any advance you took is held against the first room of the booking, so if you settle the others first they are billed in full, and the advance comes off when that room is settled.

Who is staying

Each room's card has an Occupants & photos row: one slot per adult or child the room is booked for, with a name, age, relation, phone and ID against each, and a photo taken with the camera or picked from a file. The booker's own photo goes on the verification card. A room's register is also reachable later from its folio, so a name can be added or corrected any time before check-out.

Room Board

Every room at a glance — free, occupied, due out, and (with housekeeping switched on) dirty or cleaned, with a mark cleaned action. Tap a free room to book it or check a guest in; tick several to book them together.

Rooms & Rates

Rooms & Floors is the room master — number, type and floor. Tariff Plans hold the seasonal and weekend rates per room type, with a meal plan. With Seasonal & Weekend Rates switched off, a night is simply the room type's rack rate.

Papers you hand over

After a check-in the app offers the Guest Registration Card — the sheet the guest signs. It shows the guest's photo and ID, every room on the booking with its own dates, and each room's rent, discount and final rent, with the total and anything already paid. Print it on the counter roll or on A4, or send it on WhatsApp. You can print it again any time from the stay screen.

Mid-stay, Print Folio Proforma on the stay screen gives the guest a folio: the room rent accrued so far, everything on the tab, the advance taken and what is left to pay. It is clearly marked as not a tax invoice — the tax invoice is printed when you settle the stay on Folio Settlement.

Room Service

When the property also runs a restaurant, Room Service lets you order food to a room. Pick the room, punch the items on the usual ordering screen, and the kitchen ticket prints straight away. The order goes onto the guest's bill rather than being paid at the outlet, so the meal is settled once, at check-out. Ordering again for the same room adds to the tab it already has instead of starting a second one.

If a guest orders downstairs and asks for it to go on the room, use Charge Order on the stay screen instead — that collects an order the waiter already has open on a table.

Restaurant

With Restaurant Table Service switched on, the hotel gets the table-service counter — table orders, KOT and add-ons — under its Food & Beverage menu, including the Kitchen (KDS) screen. Room service charges still land on the guest's folio. See Restaurant.

Directory

Guests are ordinary party ledgers, so a returning guest keeps their history and their balance. Companies & Agents are the same kind of record for a corporate account or a travel agent billed monthly. See Contacts.

What a night costs

flowchart TD
    A[Check-in and check-out dates] --> B[Split into segments
at every room move]
    B --> C{Tariff plans on?}
    C -->|yes| D[Seasonal / weekend rate
for that room type]
    C -->|no| E[The room type's rack rate]
    D --> F[One bill line per segment]
    E --> F
    G[Folio extras
food · laundry · minibar] --> H[Added as their own lines]
    F --> H
    H --> I[Advance already taken
deducted]
    I --> J[Amount due]

Settings

A new property starts lean: the halves below are switched on as you need them, so a twelve-room lodge is not handed a rate card, a task sheet and a deposit ledger on day one. Each one removes its screens and the reports behind it when off.

What each person may do

The Hotel group of a user’s permissions, with the labels as they appear on the form. View Revenue is the one read switch, so it survives a view-only login; the rest are writes.

Several come in pairs that are deliberately not one switch, because they are two different jobs: booking a room and re-writing a running stay, posting a charge and closing the folio, cancelling a booking and keeping money off it, reading the night’s figures and closing the date. Give both halves to one person on a small property if that is how you work — it is just never done for you.

Reports

Twenty-five hotel reports, one menu entry each. Which of them a person is offered depends on two things together: whether the feature behind it is on — a property that keeps no waitlist has no waitlist report rather than an always-empty one — and whether that person holds the switch for it. Every report also needs View Reports.

So a front desk seat gets the desk group; housekeeping gets the floor; a night auditor gets the money; and a manager gets all twenty-five. The night audit itself and Form C are screens of their own, not reports. Several reports draw a chart above the table from the same figures, and every one exports to PDF and Excel.

Business Reports: Day Book, Expenses, Income, Profit & Loss, GST. See Reports.