The system runs the daily life of your hotel from a single screen set. A reservation made at the front desk becomes a room to prepare for housekeeping, a folio for accounts, a guest profile for the CRM and a line on tonight's night audit, without anyone re-typing anything.

• Operations: Bookings, Rooms, Housekeeping and Maintenance keep the house running.
• Guests & team: Guests (CRM), Staff (rota, attendance, leave) and User Roles (who may do what).
• Revenue: Payments & invoices, the POS terminal, Restaurant & kitchen, and Inventory.
• Insights & system: Reports & exports, Notifications, the Audit log and Settings.

Everything is multi-tenant: your hotel's data is isolated at the database level, and each person signs in with a role that decides which modules they see and whether they can view, edit or fully manage them.

The guide has four parts:

1. 1
   Start here

   Signing in, moving around quickly, and what your role can do.
2. 2
   Your day

   One walk-through per kind of job, in the order a real shift runs: the front desk, the till, the pass, the rooms, and the manager's week. Signed in, you see the one written for you.
3. 3
   Modules

   One chapter per sidebar entry, in sidebar order. Each covers purpose, who uses it, the screen, workflows, statuses, fields, permissions, tips and the errors you may see.
4. 4
   Reference

   Offline mode, speed tips, troubleshooting for every error message, and a glossary.

Conventions used throughout:

• ⌘K / Ctrl K style keys mean “press together”. The shortcuts that exist: ⌘K / Ctrl K focuses global search, ? opens this guide, Esc closes what is open, and inside the guide / focuses the guide search while [ and ] page between chapters.
• Role tags next to a heading show who the section is mainly for. Anything marked Full needs full access to that module.
• Status diagrams show every state and the arrows between them, if an arrow is not drawn, the system will refuse that move.

• Press ? on any screen, click the book icon in the top bar, or choose User guide at the bottom of the sidebar.
• Every chapter has its own address, for example /guide/bookings. Use the link icon next to a heading to copy a link to that exact section and paste it to a colleague.
• The guide is public: share /guide with new staff before their account exists. Signed-in users see it inside the app; everyone else gets a light frame with a Sign in button.
• Use Print in the chapter header to save a chapter as PDF for the staff room, the layout switches to a clean single column.

Email and password

1. 1
   Open the app address

   The address your administrator gave you for your hotel, e.g. operations.yourhotel.com. On the public demo the sign-in form is at the top and the demo role dropdown sits below it.
2. 2
   Enter email and password

   Passwords are set by an administrator in Staff → Accounts, and you can change yours later in Settings → Account.
3. 3
   You land on your screen

   The desk and the managers open on the Dashboard; a waiter opens on the till, the kitchen on the kitchen display, a room attendant on the housekeeping board. The sidebar shows only the screens your role can open, and a one-screen role has no dashboard at all.

Staff PIN

Busy front desks share a hotel PIN of 4 to 8 digits. Pick your name from the staff list, type the PIN on the keypad and you are in. The PIN can never sign in as a Super Admin or Hotel Manager, those accounts always use email and password, and only a Settings-Full user can change the PIN.

The first time you sign in, a welcome card offers a three-minute tour written for your job. It walks your own screen control by control, spotlighting the real buttons: the shift pill, the menu grid, Send and Pay for a waiter; the shelves and station tabs for the kitchen; the board and the checklist for housekeeping; the pipeline, the folio and the reports for the desk and the managers. It moves between screens as it goes and ends with a short practice list.

1. 1
   Start the tour, or Skip the tour

   Skipping records that you have seen it; nothing else changes.
2. 2
   Move with Next and Back, or → ←

   Press Esc at any point to skip the rest. Each module card has an Open link that takes you straight there.
3. 3
   Finish

   The last card lists practice tasks for your job, such as opening an order on the first table and taking cash for it, or creating a walk-in and checking them in.

There are 13 standard roles. Each one has a level for each of the 13 permission modules; the matrix below is the default; administrators can adjust it in User Roles.

• View: open the module, read everything, export nothing. A small lock icon marks view-only modules in the sidebar.
• Edit: create and change records (new booking, mark a room clean, add a menu item).
• Full: also delete, approve, refund, export and change configuration.

Some screens map to a module you might not expect: Housekeeping and Maintenance sit under Rooms; POS, Restaurant and Inventory under Payments; User Roles, the Audit log and hotel-wide Settings under Settings. Security officers can always read the Audit log.

On the demo host the sign-in page shows a Demo role dropdown under the form. Pick a role and pressEnter demo to sign in as that role inside a sandbox that only your browser can see, pre-loaded with rooms, guests, hundreds of bookings, invoices, POS tickets and stock. Change anything, nobody else sees it. A purple Demo chip in the top bar shows how long the sandbox has left; Reset throws it away and starts a fresh one.

• Dark mode: click the moon/sun icon in the top bar, or Settings → Account. The choice is remembered per browser.
• Install as an app: in Chrome or Edge choose Install app from the address-bar menu; on a phone use Add to Home Screen. Installed, the app opens without browser chrome and keeps the front-desk screens available when the connection drops (see the Offline chapter).
• Device alerts: Settings → Notifications → Device alerts asks for permission to show system notifications for new alerts even when the tab is in the background.

Keyboard: ⌘K global search, ? this guide, Esc closes any drawer or dialog.

The breadcrumb always names the module you are in. The bell shows a live count of unread alerts; click it for the last few and a link to the full feed.

1. 1
   Press ⌘K (or Ctrl K)

   Focus jumps to the search box in the top bar.
2. 2
   Type at least two characters

   Booking codes (BK-1042), guest names or phone numbers, room numbers, invoice codes.
3. 3
   Pick a result

   Results are grouped; choosing one opens that module. Esc clears the box.

• The address bar is the source of truth: /guests?q=ann&tier=Gold&page=2 can be bookmarked, shared or reopened with Back/Forward.
• Typing in the search box waits a moment before querying, so you can keep typing.
• Live updates refresh the page you are looking at when someone else changes a record.

• Inline cells: click a status, priority or assignee cell to change it. It saves on change; Esc reverts; an error shows a toast and rolls the cell back. A guest's tier is a read-only badge in the list; change it in the guest drawer form.
• Kanban cards: drag a card to the next column; the card's drawer offers the same moves as buttons. Moves the system does not allow are refused with a message.
• Roles matrix: each cell is a dropdown from 0 to 3 (None, View, Edit, Full). Pick the levels for a row, then click that row's Save button. Changes bite within seconds for signed-in users.
• View-only roles see the same cells as plain text.

• Drawer (slides in from the right), a single record with its actions: a booking, a guest, a work order. The list stays visible behind it. Esc or the × closes it.
• Dialog (centre), wizards and confirmations: the new-booking wizard, check-in, taking a payment, supervisor authorisation. Destructive actions always confirm first.
• Page: the POS terminal, kitchen display, reports and settings tabs, which need the whole screen.

1. 06:30
   Handover on the Dashboard

   Sign in (email or the staff PIN). The Dashboard tells you the shape of the day: Available rooms, Occupied rooms, Arriving today with “N in-house now”, and Staff on duty. Scroll to Today's arrivals for the names and room types expected, and to Housekeeping status to see how many rooms are still cleaning from last night. Click the bell for overnight alerts.
2. 07:00
   Walk the room grid

   Open Rooms. The status tiles are the count you hand over: Available, Occupied, Reserved (a booking holds the room today), Cleaning and Maintenance. A room with a fault gets Report maintenance; a room that must not be sold today gets Out of service. You never set a status by hand, it is projected from the facts.
3. 08:00
   Departures: settle, then check out

   On the Bookings pipeline the In-House Guests column holds today's departures. Open the guest's invoice on Payments and use Record payment until the balance is zero, then click Check out in the booking drawer. If anything is still owed the server refuses: “INV-… still owes UGX …. Collect it before check-out, or a Payments manager can check out and bill later”. A user with Payments = Full is offered “Check out anyway and bill later? The folio stays open on Payments.” for bill-to-company cases. See Checking a guest out.
4. 08:05
   The room goes to housekeeping by itself

   Check-out closes the folio to new charges, creates a High-priority checkout clean task due in two hours on the Housekeeping board, turns the room Cleaning and posts the alert “Guest checked out: room to cleaning”. The room becomes sellable again only when housekeeping moves the task to Ready for Guest.
5. 10:00
   A walk-in at the desk

   Click New booking. Step 1: dates, room type, guests, Source = Walk-in, rate plan; the grey box quotes the room charge. Check availability lists free rooms of that type (never one that is out of service). Step 2: pick a room chip or Assign later, choose New guest and type the name and phone, then Create booking. The booking is saved as Confirmed; if the hotel takes deposits, a deposit line is posted to a new invoice at that moment. Full detail in Creating a booking.
6. 12:00
   The arrivals rush

   Work the Arriving Today column. Open each card and click Check in; if no room is assigned, the drawer shows “Assign a room to check in · N free”, listing only rooms that are of the booked type, not cleaning, with no open housekeeping task and nobody still inside. The server checks the same things: it is on or after the arrival day (an early arrival must have its dates moved first), the room is ready and the type matches unless the room was assigned earlier as an upgrade. On success the room turns Occupied and the folio opens with the room nights and tax lines; a deposit already invoiced is credited against it, never charged twice. See Checking a guest in.
7. 14:00
   In-house: charges land on the folio

   Lunch at the restaurant closed with the Charge to room tender on the POS appears on the guest's open folio as “POS · TKT-… · Restaurant” plus its service charge and VAT lines. A room move is a change of room on the booking (the new room must not be under maintenance or out of service); the drawer does not yet have a Move room button, so ask an administrator to make the change. Special requests stay in the amber box on the drawer for the whole stay.
8. 16:00
   No-shows and cancellations

   A confirmed guest who has not appeared by your cut-off gets No-show in the drawer (“Mark BK-… as a no-show?”). A call to cancel gets Cancel booking. Both release the room; the hotel's no-show fee (default 100% of one night) or cancellation fee (default 0%) posts to the folio automatically. See Confirming, cancelling and no-shows.
9. 18:00
   Evening payments and deposits

   On Payments record part-payments and deposits as they come in, cash, mobile money, card or bank transfer. An invoice's status (Paid, Partially Paid, Pending, Overdue) is derived from its payments every time it is shown, so the booking drawer, search and the night audit always agree with the till.
10. 22:00
    Close the business date

    On Reports a Reports = Edit user clicks Close (the button names the current business date) and confirms “Close business date”. The server re-syncs every room's status for the new day, then freezes a snapshot: rooms (total, occupied, dirty, out of order), bookings (in-house, arriving, departing, no-shows, cancelled today), cash (payments, refunds, closed POS tickets) and the total still owed on open invoices, all measured on the hotel's local day, not UTC midnight. The same date cannot be closed twice (the message reads “… is already closed” with the date). Until it is closed, the reports are live queries.

• “… arrives on 2026-09-12. Move the booking dates for an early check-in”: the guest is early. Change the dates so the folio charges the extra night, then check in.
• “Room 204 is not clean yet (HK-88 is open). Pick another room or wait for housekeeping”: housekeeping has not released the room. Pick a chip that is offered, or wait for Ready for Guest.
• “Room 204 is still occupied by BK-1039. Check them out first”: same-day turnover. Check the outgoing guest out first.
• “No Deluxe left for 2026-09-12: 8 sellable, 8 already booked”: the type is sold out that night, counting unassigned bookings too. Offer another type or date.
• “INV-… still owes …”: collect, or hand over to a Payments manager for a bill-later check-out.

The full list with fixes is in Bookings → Errors and Troubleshooting.

Folio

The open invoice attached to a stay. Opened at check-in (or earlier, for a deposit), collects room nights, taxes, fees and POS room charges, closed at check-out.

Walk-in

A guest with no reservation; a booking created at the desk with Source = Walk-in and checked in straight away.

Arriving Today

The board column for confirmed bookings whose check-in date is today or earlier and who have not checked in yet.

Stayover

An in-house guest staying another night; their room reads Occupied and housekeeping may raise a stayover refresh.

No-show

A confirmed guest who never arrived. Marking it releases the room and may post a no-show fee.

Settle later

A Payments = Full check-out with a balance still owed; audited, the folio stays payable on the Payments screen.

Night audit

Closing the hotel-local business date on Reports: a frozen snapshot of occupancy, cash and outstanding invoices.

Projection

A value computed from facts rather than stored, room status, board column, duty status, invoice status.

The Dashboard is the app's start page (and the page a phone opens when the app is installed). It greets you by first name (“Good morning, Fatima”), shows today's date, and lays out the numbers a front desk or manager needs before doing anything else. Nothing on it is edited; every tile and card links onward to the module that owns the data.

Every role can open the Dashboard. Which tiles and charts appear is decided by your levels for Rooms, Bookings, Payments and Staff, an Accountant sees revenue but no room tiles; a Maintenance user sees the room tiles and little else.

The role banner

Under the greeting a card shows your role, “Signed in as …” and one tag per permission module (Dashboard, Bookings, Rooms, Guests, Payments, Staff, Reports, Settings, Inventory, Restaurant, Kitchen, Finances, Analytics) coloured by level, grey with a lock for no access, blue for view, amber for edit, green for full. Hover a tag to read the level. It is the quickest way to see why a module is missing from your sidebar.

• Available rooms (Rooms = View), rooms whose projected status is Available, “of N total · M in maintenance”.
• Occupied rooms: rooms with a checked-in guest; the sub-line is occupied ÷ all rooms as a percentage.
• Arriving today (Bookings = View), bookings in the board's Arriving Today column: confirmed, check-in today or earlier, not yet checked in. Sub-line: how many guests are in-house now.
• Upcoming reservations: every New or Confirmed booking whose check-in is after today, however far ahead, with how many still await confirmation and the next arrival date. Click it for the list, soonest first (Status: Upcoming).
• Pipeline value (“all open bookings”): the stay totals of every booking on the board (the working set of stays touching the seven days either side of today, plus everyone in-house) added together, in the hotel currency.
• Staff on duty (Staff = View), “on duty / total”, derived at the moment you load the page from approved leave, today's attendance sheet and rostered shift windows. It is never stored; see the Staff chapter for the reasons shown per person.

• Revenue (Payments = View), “Collections · last 14 days vs previous 14”. Payments received per hotel-local day, refunds subtracted; the purple line is the 14 days before that.
• Occupancy (Bookings = View), “Rooms occupied per night · last 14 nights”, as a percentage of all rooms. Only bookings that have a room assigned count.
• Check-ins & outs (“Last 7 days”): stacked bars of actual check-in and check-out times per day.
• Room type performance (“Occupied nights · last 30 days”): for each type, occupied nights as a percentage of rooms × 30. Types with no rooms are hidden.
• Booking sources (“Last 90 days”): a donut of bookings created per source (Direct, Walk-in, Booking.com…), largest first, with the total in the middle.

Cards you are not allowed to see are simply absent; the remaining cards stretch to fill the row.

Today's arrivals

“N guests expected” lists every booking in the Arriving Today column: guest name, “Room 204 · Deluxe” (or just the type when no room is assigned yet), a Pending tag and the number of nights. Click Board to open the Bookings pipeline and check them in. The empty state reads “No arrivals expected today.” Late arrivals from earlier days stay on this list until they are checked in or marked no-show.

Quick actions

New Booking, Check In and Check Out open Bookings; Add Guest opens Guests; Create Invoice opens Payments; Assign Room opens Rooms; Report Issue opens Maintenance; Add Staff opens Staff; Notifications opens the alert feed. Only the actions whose module your role can open are shown.

Housekeeping status

Four bars over the total room count: Ready for guest (Available rooms), Cleaning in progress, Occupied, and Maintenance / out. The last bar counts rooms whose projected status is Maintenance; rooms flagged out of service are excluded from every bar.

Whenever a room, booking, invoice, housekeeping task, work order or staff record changes anywhere in the hotel, the Dashboard silently refreshes. You never need to reload it.

Each visit also saves a snapshot (rooms, board, summary) on the device. If you open the Dashboard with no connection, the snapshot is shown with an amber banner: “You're offline. Showing cached data from 4 Sep, 07:12.” When queued offline actions are sent, the page refreshes again.

• Rooms ≥ View: Available / Occupied tiles, Housekeeping status, the room counts in the KPI row.
• Bookings ≥ View: Arriving today, Upcoming reservations, Pipeline value, Occupancy, Check-ins & outs, Room type performance, Booking sources, Today's arrivals.
• Payments ≥ View: the Revenue chart.
• Staff ≥ View: the Staff on duty tile.

The Dashboard reads only; it has no actions of its own and returns no module-specific errors.

Bookings is the front desk's home screen. A booking records who is staying, in which room type (and, once assigned, which room), for which nights, at what rate and from which source. Its status drives the rest of the house: confirming it may raise a deposit invoice, checking in opens the folio and marks the room occupied, checking out closes the folio and drops a cleaning task on the housekeeping board.

• Receptionists create bookings, confirm, check in and out, and mark cancellations and no-shows (Bookings = Full by default).
• Hotel Managers do the same and may also check a guest out with a balance still owed (that needs Payments = Full).
• Accountants, Housekeeping Managers, Restaurant Managers and Security see the board and list read-only.

The four views

• List (the default): the full archive as a table, one page at a time from the server. Search box (“Search booking, guest, phone, room…”), Status and Source dropdowns, and a “Showing / total” count. Columns: Booking, Guest, Room, Dates, Status, Amount, Outstanding (the unpaid part of the stay), Source. Newest arrival date first; the filters and page live in the address bar (/bookings?status=confirmed&page=2).
• Cards: the same paged archive, one card per booking; the view phones open on.
• Pipeline: six columns: New Requests, Confirmed, Arriving Today, In-House Guests, Checked Out, Cancelled. It shows a working set: every booking whose stay touches the seven days either side of today, plus everyone in-house. This is also the snapshot the app keeps for offline use.
• Calendar: a Monday-first month grid. Each day lists up to three arrivals (“+N more arriving” beyond that), a “N in-house” count for stays spanning the day and “N departing”. Use the arrows or Today to move months; on a phone it becomes an agenda of active days only.

The booking drawer

Clicking a card or row opens the booking: its status select, the stay facts, any special requests, and a navy money panel with the stay total, what has been collected and what is still due. Every receipt and refund on the stay is listed under Payments with its code, method, reference and amount. With Payments “Can edit” the footer offers Take payment (or Take deposit before arrival), which records money straight onto the stay's folio without leaving the screen.

Filters opens the “Filter bookings” dialog: Status, Source, Stay from and Stay until, with Clear and Show results. On the Pipeline the filters narrow the board and the KPI tiles; on the List they are written to the URL so the page can be bookmarked or shared.

1. 1
   Click New booking

   The “New booking” dialog opens on “Step 1 of 3: stay details & availability”.
2. 2
   Enter the stay

   Check-in (today or later), Check-out (at least one night), Room type, Adults and Children (the lists stop at what the room type sleeps; a bigger party is a group), Source (Booking.com, Direct, Expedia, Walk-in, Travel Agent, Corporate) and, if the hotel has any, a Rate plan. The hotel's default plan is preselected; only plans that apply to the chosen room type are listed. On a published sheet you also choose a board basis and may add child extra beds (pick the age: ages the sheet prices show their nightly figure, any other age asks for a price per night; typing a price over a published one changes it for this booking; either way the bill marks it as a manual rate), and the price summary shows the sum as the guest will be asked for it.
3. 3
   Read the quote

   A grey box shows “N nights · room charge …” for the chosen plan. It is the room charge before tax; the final total is computed from the hotel's service charge, VAT and levy settings when you save.
4. 4
   Click Check availability

   The wizard asks the server which rooms of that type are free for those nights (maintenance and out-of-service rooms are never offered) and moves to “Step 2 of 3: room & guest”.
5. 5
   Pick a room, or Assign later

   Room chips read “204 · Fl 1”. If none are free you see “No {type} rooms free for those dates. The booking can still be saved without a room and assigned later.” The capacity guard still checks that the type is not oversold.
6. 6
   Choose the guest

   Existing guest: type at least two characters of a name, code, phone or email and pick from the list. New guest: Full name (required), Phone, Email, the profile is created with the booking.
7. 7
   Add Special requests (optional) and click Payment

   Step 3 of 3 opens on the money.
8. 8
   Take the deposit

   A navy panel gives the stay total including service charge, VAT and levy, with the nightly breakdown under it. Chips offer the hotel's deposit percentage (when it has one), the full amount, or Nothing yet; you can also type any figure. Enter one and the method appears: Cash, Mobile Money (with MTN / Airtel and a reference), Card or Bank Transfer.
9. 9
   Choose the booking status and save

   Confirmed holds the room and emails the guest; Request holds it unconfirmed. The button reads “Take UGX … & book” when money is being collected and “Create booking” when it is not. The booking and the receipt are saved together.

1. 1
   Open the booking

   Click the card in Arriving Today (or Confirmed for an early arrival, which will be refused, see below), or find it in the List and click the row.
2. 2
   Click Check in in the drawer footer

   You can also drag the card into In-House Guests, or pick Checked In in the Status select.
3. 3
   Assign a room if there is none yet

   The drawer shows “Assign a room to check in · N free” with a chip per room that is free for the stay, of the booked type, not cleaning, with no open housekeeping task and no guest still inside. Click a chip to check in to it. If the list is empty you see “No free {type} rooms for those dates”.
4. 4
   Done

   A toast reads “BK-… → Checked In”. The room turns Occupied, the folio opens with the room nights and tax lines, and a “Guest checked in: Room N” alert is posted.

The rules the server enforces

• Arrival day: the hotel-local date of the action must not be before the booking's check-in date. Late arrivals are fine; an early arrival must have its dates moved first so the folio charges the nights actually slept.
• A room must be assigned: either earlier on the booking or from the chips at check-in.
• Type must match: a room picked at the desk must be of the booked room type. A room assigned earlier on the booking stands even if it is a different type (an upgrade).
• Room must be ready: not out of service or under maintenance, not in Cleaning, and with no open housekeeping task.
• Nobody still inside: a same-day turnover is a legal reservation, but the physical check-in waits until the outgoing guest has checked out. The room row is locked so two desks cannot both pass the check.
• The same rule everywhere: creating a booking with a room, moving a booking to another room and changing its dates or room type run the identical check. Moving an in-house guest to another room needs that room clean and empty too, and sends housekeeping to the room they left.
• The party fits: a booking, an edit or a group room is refused with “Type sleeps 2 adults + 1 child; 3 adults requested” when the guests exceed the room type's capacity. The wizard shows “sleeps 2+1” on each type.

1. 1
   Settle the folio

   Open the invoice on the Payments screen and use Record payment until the balance is zero (see the Payments chapter).
2. 2
   Click Check out in the booking drawer

   Or drag the card from In-House Guests to Checked Out, or pick Checked Out in the Status select.
3. 3
   If a balance remains

   The server refuses with “INV-… still owes UGX …. Collect it before check-out, or a Payments manager can check out and bill later”. A user with Payments = Full is asked “Check out anyway and bill later? The folio stays open on Payments.” Confirming checks out with the balance outstanding and writes an audit entry.
4. 4
   What happens next

   The open folio is closed to new charges, a High-priority checkout-clean housekeeping task due in two hours is created for the room, the room turns Cleaning, and a “Guest checked out: room to cleaning” alert is posted.

• Confirm (New → Confirmed), drawer button Confirm, or drag the card from New Requests to Confirmed. Posts the deposit hold and sends the confirmation email as described above.
• Cancel booking (New or Confirmed → Cancelled), opens “Cancel BK-…?” / “{guest}'s stay will be cancelled and the room released.” Confirm with Cancel booking. Any deposit or prepayment on the booking is released first; a cancellation fee of the hotel's cancel percentage of the stay, with tax, is then posted if that percentage is above zero (default 0%). Paid more than the fee? The money box shows to refund.
• No-show (Confirmed → No Show), opens “Mark BK-… as a no-show?” / “{guest} did not arrive. The room is released. A no-show fee may post to the folio.” Confirm with Mark no-show. Deposits are released the same way; the fee is the hotel's no-show percentage of the first night, with tax (default 100%). A no-show can only be recorded from the arrival day onwards, the API refuses it earlier; from the day after, a plain request (New) can be marked a no-show too.

Fees and deposits land on the booking's open pre-arrival invoice (one is opened if needed) as a line such as “No-show fee · BK-1042 (100% of one night)”. A fee posted onto an invoice that was already paid reopens it; a deposit larger than the fee leaves a refund due that Payments settles. Both moves clear the room from the booking.

1. 1
   Click New group

   The “New group” dialog: “Allot rooms under one lead guest, assign room numbers later”.
2. 2
   Fill in the block

   Group name (tour operator, wedding, conference…), Check-in and Check-out, the Lead guest (search an existing profile, or switch to New guest to create one), and per room type how many rooms (up to 40, eight types, 80 rooms in total) and how many adults sleep in each.
3. 3
   Click Create group

   The server checks capacity for each type over the whole block, then creates one Confirmed booking per room, unassigned, with the adults you chose per room, source Direct, all under the lead guest, and gives the group a GRP-… code. Toast: “Group GRP-… · N rooms”.

Group bookings appear on the board as ordinary cards carrying the group code tag. Assign rooms and check each one in exactly like a single booking. The wizard's validation messages are “Give the group a name”, “Pick the lead guest” and “Allot at least one room”.

Every room type has a base rate. A rate plan is one of three kinds, BAR, Weekend, Promo, Rack Rate, STO Rate, and can be limited to one room type, to certain days of the week, and to a valid-from / valid-to window. Inactive plans are never offered.

• For each night of the stay: if the plan is inactive, outside its dates or not on its days, the base rate applies. Otherwise a fixed plan amount wins; failing that the base rate is adjusted by the plan's percentage (for example −15%).
• The booking keeps rate = the average of the nightly rates and amount = the subtotal with service charge, VAT and levy applied in that order. The folio opened at check-in uses the same figures, so quote and folio always agree.
• Changing a room type's base rate or a plan later affects new quotes only. Existing bookings keep the rate they were sold at.

Published sheets: Rack and STO

A lodge that sells through tour operators does not bend one price; it publishes a table. A Rack Rate plan and an STO Rate plan each price every room type on each board basis, and the room type's base rate is not used at all. Choose the plan and the board basis in the wizard and the price appears; there is nothing to calculate.

• BB is Bed & Breakfast, HB is Half Board (breakfast and one further main meal, per hotel policy), FB is Full Board. They are different prices, not a surcharge on one price.
• Child extra beds are priced per night and per board basis for the age band the hotel publishes, and are billed as their own line on the folio, never folded into the nightly rate. A bed follows the whole stay unless you shorten it.
• A child whose age falls outside every band is refused, not charged the nearest rate. Somebody with the right access can name a price, and the booking records that a person set it.
• If a price is missing from the sheet the wizard says so and names the room type and the date. Nothing is ever priced at zero because a cell was left blank.

The price summary in the wizard is the server's own arithmetic, not the screen's: the room nights, each extra bed on its own line, then the hotel's service charge, VAT and levy. Change the dates, the plan, the board or a bed and it re-prices at once. What it shows is what the booking is written at, and what the folio bills.

Sheets are edited in Settings → Accommodation rates (Settings = Edit) as the same matrix the owners printed: room types down, BB / HB / FB across, and the extra-bed bands beneath. Anyone who may take a booking can read a sheet; only Settings edit access can change one, and every changed cell is written to the audit log with its old and new figure. Changing a sheet affects new quotes only.

A sheet can be published in its own currency. When it is, the stay is quoted, booked, shown and billed in that money, and nothing is converted: a meal rung up in the hotel's own currency cannot be charged to such a folio, so the till takes that money instead.

Plans are managed in Settings → Hotel → Rate plans (Settings = Edit): each row shows the name, code and kind with an editable percentage and a Save button. The hotel's default plan is what the wizard preselects.

• New Reservation: a request that holds inventory but has not been confirmed. The drawer offers Confirm and Cancel booking. (The server also accepts a direct check-in of a New booking; the drawer only offers Check in on Confirmed ones.)
• Confirmed: holds the room type (and room, if assigned). Deposit and confirmation email have gone out.
• Checked In: guest in-house; folio open; room Occupied.
• Checked Out, Cancelled, No Show: final. Read-only from here; the room is released.

Board columns are derived

The column a card sits in is computed from its status and the hotel's date, by the same function on the server and in the browser:

• New Reservation → New Requests
• Confirmed with check-in after today → Confirmed; check-in today or earlier → Arriving Today
• Checked In → In-House Guests; Checked Out → Checked Out
• Cancelled and No Show → Cancelled

So you cannot drop a card into Arriving Today, the toast says “Arriving Today is based on the check-in date. Confirm the booking if it is still a request.” Any other move the lifecycle does not allow answers “That column isn't a valid next step for this booking”.

A booking's history (every status change, who made it and when) is stored and shown by the API; the drawer's Status select offers only the moves drawn above (“Only valid transitions are offered; check-in asks for a room, check-out closes the folio.”).

• Bookings = View: Pipeline, List, Calendar, the booking drawer, rate plans and the availability search (the wizard's room list also needs Rooms = View to load room types).
• Bookings = Edit: New booking, New group, Confirm, Cancel booking, No-show, Check in, Check out, drag-and-drop on the board.
• Payments = Full: the “Check out anyway and bill later?” override when a folio still has a balance.
• Settings = Edit: create or change rate plans.

Rooms is where the house is defined and watched. A room type (Standard, Deluxe, Suite…) carries the base nightly rate, bed description and size; a room is a number on a floor that belongs to one type. Bookings are sold by type and assigned to a room; the room's status on this screen tells the desk whether a guest can walk into it.

• Receptionists (Rooms = Edit) watch the grid, take a room out of service and raise housekeeping or maintenance tasks from it.
• Housekeeping Managers and Hotel Managers (Rooms = Full) also add and delete rooms and manage room types and rates.
• Maintenance (Edit) uses the grid to report issues; Security sees it read-only.

Every room carries the stay holding it today: the card and the Guest today column name the guest, say whether they are In-house or Reserved, and show the stay dates. Rooms nobody is booked into read “No guest today”. A room can be Cleaning or Maintenance and still have a reservation waiting on it, which is exactly the case the desk needs to see early.

Out-of-service rooms have no tile of their own, they show with the grey Out of Service badge under All rooms and carry a red “Out of service” badge in the drawer. The Housekeeping dropdown filters on the HK state (clean, pending, in progress, occupied) that the projection stores alongside the status.

Click any card, tile or row to open “Room N”, headed with its type, beds and size, a status badge, floor and an “Out of service” badge when set.

• Occupancy: who holds the room today: guest, guest code and booking code, the status badge, In-house / Arriving today / Reserved, the dates, nights, guests and country, their phone and email, when they checked in, and what the folio has been charged and paid with the balance still due. Open bookingjumps to that booking in the archive. When nobody is booked in it says so.
• Price / night, Housekeeping, Last released, Past stays: the four summary cards. Notes (for example the out-of-service reason) appear below them.
• Next 14 days: a strip of day cells painted by the stays that hold the room (blue = in-house, purple = confirmed), then Revenue for the last 30 and 90 days with the nights behind it, the room type profile (sleeps, beds, size, amenities) and the last Housekeeping and Maintenance events on this room.
• Open work: every open housekeeping task and maintenance order on the room, with its code, status and who it is assigned to. Orders that block the room are flagged.
• Next arrivals: the next five reservations on the room; click one to open it.
• Stay history: every stay this room has ever carried (guest, booking, dates, nights, status, amount and anything still owed), 25 at a time with Prev / Next underneath.

Under Room actions the drawer reminds you: “Status is projected from bookings, housekeeping and maintenance. It is not edited directly.”

• Out of service: flags the room; it disappears from availability and reads Out of Service regardless of anything else. Toast: “Room N marked out of service”. This works offline and is queued until the connection returns. It is refused while a guest is in-house, and when reservations still hold the room a dialog lists them (“Room 12 has 2 upcoming bookings (BK-…, BK-…)”) and offers Unassign them and continue, after which those bookings wait for a room on the board.
• Return to service: clears the flag; the projection recomputes at once (“Room N returned to service”). Also offline-capable.
• Create HK task: raises a deep-clean task at Medium priority on the Housekeeping board (“HK task created for N”). The room reads Cleaning until housekeeping marks it Ready for Guest.
• Report maintenance: opens a work order titled “Issue in room N” (category General, Medium priority) on the Maintenance board (“Maintenance reported for N”). It only blocks the room if the work order is marked as blocking.

View-only users see “View-only access. Status changes need the Rooms edit permission.” instead of the action chips. Rooms = Full users also get a red Delete button in the footer.

1. 1
   Click New room

   The dialog “New room, Appears immediately in availability and the booking wizard” opens.
2. 2
   Enter Room number, Floor and Room type

   Numbers are unique within the hotel (up to 10 characters); floor 0–50. The type list shows the base rate per night.
3. 3
   Click Add room

   Toast “Room N added”. The room starts Available and counts toward its type's sellable capacity from that moment.

Deleting

Open the room, click Delete and confirm. A room a guest has ever slept in, or that a restaurant bill was ever charged to, is refused with the count: the stays have to keep naming the room they were sold. Take it out of service instead, which stops it being sold and keeps everything. Open housekeeping tasks and work orders do not block the delete for a Super Admin; they go with the room.

1. 1
   Click Room types

   The dialog “Room types & rates, Rate changes apply to new bookings only. Existing bookings keep their agreed rate” lists every type with Beds, the number of Rooms and an editable Rate / night (UGX).
2. 2
   Change a rate

   Type a whole figure into the rate cell and press Enter or click away. Toast: “Deluxe → UGX 280,000/night (new bookings only)”.
3. 3
   Add a type

   Fill Name, Rate (UGX), Beds (e.g. “1 King”) and optionally the size (“26 m²”), then click the plus button. Empty required fields give “Fill name, rate and beds”.
4. 4
   Edit the profile

   Each row shows Sleeps (adults + children) and the amenities as icons. Profile opens a dialog for Adults (1 to 20), Children (0 to 10), Amenities (picked from a list, up to 30) and a Description (up to 600 characters). Toast: “<name> profile saved”. The profile shows in the room drawer and feeds the reports.

Room types are ordered by the sequence they were created in.

Amenities

Amenities are picked from a list, never typed: open Profile on a room type and press the amenities box. The list drops down grouped the way a person thinks about a room (Comfort, Bathroom, Media and work, Drinks and food, Outside the room, Service, Hotel facilities, Access and policy), and every row is acheckbox, so the list itself shows what this room already has. Tick and untick as many as you like; the box above says how many are picked, Clear empties it, and each one also appears underneath as a chip with its icon and an x. Saving shows on the room types table behind at once, without closing it.

On the Rooms screens they show as icons alone: the room types table and the room drawer draw the little pictures, with the name on hover and on the accessible name, and a “+3” when there are more than fit. A list of six pictures reads as a room at a glance where six words read as a wall of text.

Stopping a type being sold

Each row has a red bin. What happens when you press it depends on what the type is carrying, and the app says which:

• Nothing points at it: it goes, along with any published prices it had. Bookings are not affected because there are none.
• It has rooms but has never been booked: “Room type “Trial Wing” still has 1 room.” A Hotel Manager is told a Super Admin can delete it anyway; the Super Admin gets a Move its rooms to picker, and one press moves the rooms and deletes the type together.
• A guest has been sold it: “still has 639 bookings, 3 group allotments, 15 rooms and 6 published rates. The 639 bookings and 3 group allotments cannot be deleted with it.” Nothing gets past that, at any access level, because a folio has to keep saying what it sold. Move its rooms to another type instead: the type stays on the old bookings and stops being sold the moment its last room leaves.

Asking “which rooms are free from A to B” returns rooms that are not out of service and have no New, Confirmed or Checked In booking whose nights overlap the requested window (a room under maintenance today still counts for later dates; the ready-only variant used at check-in also drops Maintenance and Cleaning rooms). Optionally limit it to one room type. The booking wizard uses this at Check availability.

At check-in the desk asks for ready rooms only: the same list minus rooms in Cleaning, rooms with an open housekeeping task and rooms where a guest is still checked in (a same-day turnover). That mirrors the check-in rules exactly, so a chip the drawer offers never fails.

The stored status is recomputed from five facts, and the first that is true wins:

1. Out of Service: the out-of-service flag is set (HK state pending).
2. Occupied: a booking is Checked In on the room (HK state occupied).
3. Maintenance: an open work order (Reported, Assigned, In Progress or Waiting for Parts) is marked as blocking the room.
4. Cleaning: an open housekeeping task (Dirty, Assigned, In Progress or Inspection) exists for the room (HK state in progress).
5. Reserved: a New or Confirmed booking holds the room today in hotel-local time: its check-in is today or earlier and its check-out is later than today. A booking three weeks out does not make the room Reserved.
6. Available: none of the above (HK state clean).

Because the Reserved rule depends on the date, the server also re-syncs every room of every hotel on a timer, every 30 minutes by default (ROOM_SYNC_MINUTES; 0 disables it), and again when the night audit closes the business day. Between sweeps, every booking, housekeeping, maintenance and out-of-service action re-syncs the rooms it touches, so the grid is right within seconds of the fact changing.

• Rooms = View: the grid, list and floor views, room types and rates (read-only), the drawer.
• Rooms = Edit: Out of service, Return to service, Create HK task, Report maintenance.
• Rooms = Full: New room, Delete, Room types (add a type, change rates, delete a type). Deleting past rooms that are still on a type needs a Super Admin.
• Bookings = View: the availability search used by the wizard and check-in.

Housekeeping tracks one task per room that needs attention. A checkout at the front desk creates a task on its own; you add stayover refreshes and deep cleans yourself. Each task moves across the board from Dirty Rooms to Ready for Guest, carries a checklist, and, while it is open, puts the room into Cleaning status on the Rooms module so the front desk cannot check a guest into it.

• Housekeeping managers run the board, inspect rooms and sign them off as ready.
• Room attendants (signed in with the front-desk PIN, or on a shared tablet) tick checklist items and move their own rooms forward.
• Receptionists watch the board to know which rooms are back in the sellable pool; they can also raise a stayover refresh when a guest asks.

Housekeeping sits under the Rooms permission module: View shows everything read-only, Edit creates tasks and moves them.

Views

• List (the default): a paged table loaded from the server one page at a time. Adds a Status filter and lives in the address bar (?status=ready&floor=2&page=2), so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Columns: Room, Floor, Type, Assigned, Priority, Status. Click a row to select the task for the checklist view.
• Cards (?view=cards): the same paged archive, one card per task; the view phones open on.
• Board (?view=kanban): the whole working set of tasks, never paged. Filters: search (room, task code, staff, note), Task type, Priority, Assigned to, Floor. Status has no filter here because the columns already are the status.
• Cleaning checklist: the checklist of the task you last clicked; if you have not clicked one, the first task that is In Progress.

Your view choice is remembered per module in a cookie on this browser, and ?view= in the address shares it. Phones default to Cards.

1. 1
   The front desk checks the guest out

   A Checkout clean task appears in Dirty Rooms with High priority, due by the hotel's check-in time (or two hours out when that is closer). An alert “Housekeeping: Room 204 needs cleaning” goes to the notification feed. If the room already has an open checkout clean, no second task is created.
2. 2
   Move the card to Assigned or straight to In Progress

   Drag the card, or click the → Assigned button on it. From Dirty Rooms you may skip Assigned and go directly to In Progress.
3. 3
   Tick the checklist as the room is cleaned

   Open the Cleaning checklist tab (or click the card first so it becomes the selected task). Each line, “Strip & change linens”, “Clean bathroom & restock”, …, saves the moment you tick it and records who ticked it.
4. 4
   Send it to Inspection

   Click Move to Inspection at the bottom of the checklist, or the card button. Inspection can start with ticks still open; releasing the room cannot: Ready for Guest is refused while a checklist line is open (“3 checklist items still open on Room 204”), unless a supervisor with Rooms · Full access releases it anyway, which is audited.
5. 5
   Supervisor signs off: Ready for Guest

   From Inspection the only forward move is Ready for Guest. The room drops out of Cleaning status, a green alert “Room 204 ready” is posted, and the change is written to the audit log. A room that fails inspection goes back to In Progress instead.

1. 1
   Click New task

   Top right of the page. You need Rooms Edit.
2. 2
   Pick the Room

   The list shows every room as “204 · Floor 1 · Deluxe”. Occupied rooms are allowed, that is the point of a stayover refresh.
3. 3
   Pick the Task type

   Stayover refresh or Deep clean. Checkout cleans cannot be created by hand; only a checkout makes one.
4. 4
   Click Create

   The task appears in Dirty Rooms (or straight in Assigned if you picked an attendant) and the toast names its code. The room shows as Cleaning on the Rooms page until the task is Ready (unless a guest is in house, in which case Occupied wins).

When a task is created the system copies the hotel's active checklist steps onto it, in order. If the hotel has never edited its template, the built-in list is used:

• Strip & change linens
• Make beds
• Clean bathroom & restock
• Vacuum & mop floors
• Dust all surfaces
• Empty bins
• Restock minibar
• Restock amenities
• Check lights & AC
• Final inspection

To change the template open Settings → Ops config → Housekeeping checklist(needs Settings Full). You can rename a step in place, switch a step off without deleting it, or add a new one with New checklist step. As the screen says: “Changes apply to tasks created from now on; open tasks keep their checklist.”

Ticks are per task and per person: each tick stores who completed it and when. Unticking clears both. The checklist gates one move only: a room is not Ready for Guest until every line is ticked, unless a supervisor (Rooms · Full access) releases it, in which case the audit log records the override.

• Dirty Rooms: nobody is on it yet. Checkout cleans start here at High priority.
• Assigned: an attendant owns it. Moving a card back to Dirty Rooms puts it up for grabs again.
• In Progress: being cleaned; the checklist is normally ticked during this stage.
• Inspection: cleaned, waiting for a supervisor. Pass → Ready; fail → back to In Progress.
• Ready for Guest: final. Counts towards the “Completed” tile.

What is derived, not stored

• The board column is simply the task status, there is no separate column field.
• Overdue is worked out on screen: an open task whose due time is earlier than now.
• The room's status on the Rooms page is recomputed after every task change: out of service → occupied → blocked by maintenance → Cleaning (any task not yet Ready) → reserved → available. Nobody sets “Cleaning” by hand.
• The check-in room picker only offers rooms that are ready, so a room with an open task cannot be handed to an arriving guest until its task reaches Ready for Guest.

• Rooms View: open the board, list and checklist read-only. The New task button and the → buttons are hidden; cards cannot be dragged.
• Rooms Edit: create tasks, move cards, tick checklist items.
• Settings Full: edit the checklist template in Settings → Ops config.

By default that means Housekeeping Mgr, Receptionist, Maintenance, Hotel Manager and Super Admin can work the board; Security can only look; Accountant, Restaurant Mgr and HR Manager do not see the module at all.

• Use Assigned to → Unassigned together with Floor to hand out a floor's rooms at the start of a shift.
• The board search matches room number, task code, attendant name and the checkout note, so typing “lamp” finds the room whose note mentions it.
• Click a card to make it the selected task, then switch to Cleaning checklist; the header shows “Room 204: Checkout clean” and the code so you know you are ticking the right one.
• The List view sorts by creation date (newest first) and pages 50 at a time (25, 50 or 100); change rows-per-page at the bottom. Esc closes any dialog.
• Dragging a card to a column the workflow does not allow shows “Move to an allowed next column in the cleaning workflow” and leaves the card where it was.

Client-side messages: “Pick a room” (New task with no room chosen), “Could not update task” / “Could not create task” / “Could not update checklist” when the request fails for a reason other than the above.

Stayover refresh

A light service of a room whose guest is staying another night.

Checkout clean

The full turn-around after a guest departs; created automatically by check-out.

Ready for Guest

The final task status. The room is sellable again and can be picked at check-in.

Working set

Every task on the board, regardless of age, the same list the offline snapshot keeps.

Maintenance keeps a work order for every fault: a broken AC, a leaking tap in the lobby, a pool pump. Anyone with Rooms Edit can report one; the maintenance team works it through six statuses. A work order tied to a room can block that room, it shows as Maintenance on the Rooms page and leaves the sellable pool, until the repair is completed.

• Maintenance technicians live in the list and board, moving orders along and recording cost.
• Housekeeping and front desk report what they find (“AC not cooling”, “lamp broken in 204”).
• Managers watch the KPI tiles, open requests, high priority, estimated cost, and use the list filters for a weekly review.

Maintenance sits under the Rooms permission module, the same as Housekeeping.

The Board tab lays the same open orders out as cards in the columns Reported · Assigned · In Progress · Waiting for Parts · Completed. Because it only loads open work, the Completed column is where cards leave the board: drop one there and it reappears in the list. Closed orders never show on the board.

1. 1
   Click Report issue

   Top right. Needs Rooms Edit.
2. 2
   Describe it in Issue title

   At least three characters, e.g. “AC not cooling”. Submitting with less shows “Describe the issue”.
3. 3
   Category and Priority

   Category is free text with suggestions from categories already in use (default “General”). Priority is High, Medium or Low, Medium unless you change it.
4. 4
   Room (optional) or Location

   Pick a room, or leave “Not a room” and type a Location such as “Lobby, Pool deck…”. An empty location is saved as “General area”.
5. 5
   Click Submit

   The order gets an M-code and starts in Reported. A notification “Maintenance: AC not cooling” is posted, red for High priority, amber otherwise. The toast reads “Maintenance request created”.

1. 1
   Assign a technician

   Click the Technician cell in the list (or the field in the drawer) and pick a person, or External contractor. The picker lists active staff, maintenance people first (search by name, job title or department; “Show everyone” for the rest); the technician gets a notification if they can sign in. Assigning an order that is still Reported moves it to Assigned on its own.
2. 2
   Start work

   From Assigned choose In Progress: or Waiting for Parts if you already know a part is needed. In the drawer these are footer buttons; in the list the Status cell offers “→ In Progress” and “→ Waiting for Parts”; on the board drag the card or click its “→ In Progress” button.
3. 3
   Record what it will cost and when

   In the drawer edit Estimated cost (whole shillings; it feeds the Est. cost tile) and Due (a date). Every edit saves as you leave the field.
4. 4
   Waiting for parts

   Move to Waiting for Parts while a part is on order. The room stays blocked. When it arrives go back to In Progress, or straight to Completed if the fit is trivial.
5. 5
   Complete

   The purple Completed button in the drawer. The room is unblocked and returns to its normal status. The technician can no longer be changed.
6. 6
   Close

   A supervisor checks the work and clicks Closed. From here the order is read-only (“Closed orders are read-only.”) and it cannot be reopened.

Every status change and field edit is written to the audit log with the from/to status and the fields that changed. Moving a card to a column the workflow does not allow shows “Move to an allowed next column on this work order”.

• Reported: logged, nobody on it. The only way forward is assigning someone (which happens automatically when you pick a technician).
• Assigned: owned by a technician or an external contractor.
• In Progress and Waiting for Parts: active work; you can bounce between them.
• Completed: repair done. Counts as “Resolved”. Technician is locked; other fields still editable.
• Closed: signed off. Read-only, no reopening. Never shown on the board.
• Cancelled: raised by mistake or overtaken by events. Available from any open column as Cancel order in the drawer (never by dragging); the order leaves the board, stops blocking its room, stays in the List as a record and can no longer be edited. Whether an order blocks its room can only be changed while the work is open.

What is derived, not stored

• Open requests = Reported + Assigned + In Progress + Waiting for Parts. In progress tile = In Progress + Waiting for Parts. Resolved = Completed + Closed. Est. cost sums every order's estimate.
• The room's Maintenance status is recomputed after every change: a room is blocked only while an order on it has Room blocked while open switched on and is in one of the four open statuses. Completing or closing the order, or flipping the toggle to Sellable, releases the room automatically.
• Location reads “Room 204” for room orders and the free-text label otherwise.

• Rooms View: see the list, board and drawer. Cells show as plain text; the drawer says “You have view-only access to maintenance.”
• Rooms Edit: Report issue, every inline edit, every status move including Completed and Closed.

Default roles with Edit or better: Maintenance, Receptionist, Housekeeping Mgr, Hotel Manager, Super Admin. Security has View. Accountants and HR do not see the module; if they need cost figures, use the Reports module instead.

• Tiles are filters. Click Open requests to hide everything completed or closed; click High priority to stack it with the priority filter. The Status dropdown clears the “open only” tile filter and vice versa.
• Edit without opening. Priority, Technician and Status change straight from the table. A refused change shows a toast and the cell snaps back; Esc cancels an open cell.
• Bookmark a view. /maintenance?tech=external&status=parts reopens exactly that list. Your List/Board choice is remembered per browser.
• Weekly review. Filter Status → Completed and close orders in bulk from the Status cell, one click each.
• Live. Any change by a colleague refreshes your list, tiles and board within seconds; the drawer keeps your place.
• Maintenance has no offline queue, if the connection drops, changes fail with a toast and you retry when it returns. Rooms → Out of service is the offline-capable way to pull a room quickly.

Client-side: “Describe the issue” (title under three characters); “Could not create work order” / “Could not update work order” for other failures. A title over 120 characters, a category over 40, or a negative cost is rejected as a 400 validation error before it reaches the server rules.

Work order

One maintenance record with an M-code, from Reported to Closed.

Blocks room

The toggle that keeps a room out of the sellable pool while its order is open.

External

A contractor outside the hotel; the order has no user assigned but counts as Assigned.

Open work

Reported, Assigned, In Progress and Waiting for Parts, what the board shows.

Guests is the hotel's CRM. Every booking points at a guest profile, a G-code, contact details, country, loyalty tier and notes, so the front desk recognises a returning guest and management can see who actually stays and spends. Profiles are usually created by the booking wizard; the New guest button is for adding someone before their first booking or setting up a corporate account.

• Receptionists search the directory during check-in, fix a phone number, read the notes (“prefers high floor”).
• Managers use the KPI strip and tier chips for loyalty and repeat-business figures, and export the list.
• Accountants and the restaurant have view-only access to look a guest up.

Above the chips sit four KPI tiles when analytics are available: Total guests, Loyalty members(Silver tier and above), Returning rate (repeat stayers) and In-house now. Phones open the Cards view; the Table / Cards switch sits in the page head next to the search box.

1. 1
   Type in “Search name, code, phone…”

   Matches name, G-code, phone, email and company name. The list narrows as you type; the count reads “12 of 480 guests”.
2. 2
   Narrow with the chips and selects

   Click a tier chip, choose Corporate only, or pick a country. Filters combine. Clear resets all of them.
3. 3
   Click the row

   The drawer opens with the guest's name and code (plus company for corporate guests).
4. 4
   Read the three stat cards

   Total stays, Lifetime spend and Member since (the date the profile was created).
5. 5
   Scroll the Stay history

   Up to 25 most recent bookings, newest first: booking code, room and room type, dates, status badge (Checked In, Cancelled, …) and amount. “No bookings yet.” for a fresh profile.

New guest

1. 1
   Click New guest

   The dialog reminds you: “Guests are also created automatically by the booking wizard”.
2. 2
   Full name

   Required, at least two characters, otherwise “Enter the guest's name”.
3. 3
   Phone, Alternative phone, Email, Country, Tier

   All optional except Tier, which defaults to Bronze. The alternative phone is a second number for the same guest, searched alongside the first. Email must be a valid address. Tiers: Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze.
4. 4
   Corporate account

   Tick it to reveal a Company name box. The list then shows a “corporate” tag next to the name and the drawer a Corporate badge.
5. 5
   Notes, then Add guest

   Up to 500 characters. The toast reads “Guest Jane Doe added” and the profile drawer is ready to open.

Editing

Open the drawer and click Edit (Guests Edit needed). Name, Phone, Alternative phone, Email, Country, Tier and Notes become fields; Save writes them and the toast “Guest updated” confirms. The corporate flag and company name are not on the edit form, set them when the profile is created. Every edit is written to the audit log.

• Stays counts bookings whose status is Checked In or Checked Out. Cancellations, no-shows and reservations that have not arrived yet do not count, so a guest with three future bookings and no history still shows 0 stays.
• Lifetime spend is the sum of payments received on that guest's invoices, with refunds subtracted. It is not the billed total: an unpaid folio adds nothing until it is paid. A dash means nothing has been collected.
• Returning rate = guests with two or more real stays ÷ guests with at least one, as a percentage.
• Loyalty members = everyone not in Bronze. The tier chips count guests per tier across the whole hotel.
• In-house now = distinct guests with a booking currently checked in.

Tick Corporate account in New guest and enter the company name. From then on:

• The directory shows a corporate tag next to the name and the “Corporate only” filter finds it.
• The drawer subtitle reads “G-… · Company Ltd” and shows a Corporate badge and a Company card.
• Search matches the company name as well as the contact person's name.
• Stays and spend accumulate on the company profile, so the account's real value is visible in one place.

Pick the company profile as the guest in the booking wizard and choose the Corporate booking source; invoices then carry the company as the billed party.

• Guests View: directory, drawer, analytics tiles. No New guest or Edit buttons.
• Guests Edit: New guest, Edit / Save in the drawer.
• Reports Full: the Export button (the file is produced by the Reports module).

Default roles: Receptionist has Edit; Accountant, Restaurant Mgr and Security have View; Housekeeping, Maintenance and HR do not see the module.

• Export. Click Export in the page head. The toast reads “Guest export queued. Download it from Reports”, and the workbook appears under Reports → Exports once it is built. The export is the full directory, not the filtered page.
• Bookmark a segment. /guests?tier=Gold&country=Kenya reopens the same slice; share it with the sales team.
• Country spelling. The country select only offers what has been typed before, so “Uganda” and “UG” become two entries. Fix stragglers with Edit.
• Notes at check-in. The booking drawer shows the guest's notes, so put anything the desk must know here rather than on a single booking.
• The typeahead in the booking wizard uses the same search rules (name, code, phone, email) and returns the top eight matches.

Client-side: “Enter the guest's name” (blank name on New guest), “Could not add the guest”, “Could not save changes”, “Could not open guest”, “Could not queue the export” (export needs Reports Full and a working export queue).

Real stay

A booking that reached Checked In or Checked Out. The only kind that counts as a stay.

Lifetime spend

Collected payments on the guest's invoices minus refunds, cash in the till, not amounts billed.

Tier

Loyalty band (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze). Set manually; Silver and above are “loyalty members”.

Corporate account

A guest profile flagged as a company, with a company name, used as the billed party for its travellers.

Payments & Invoices is the money side of a stay. Every booking that is confirmed or checked in has an invoice, the folio: that collects room nights, taxes, deposits, fees and restaurant charges. This screen lists those invoices, shows what has been paid, lets you record a payment or a refund, and prints or emails the invoice.

There is no card gateway: the system records money that has already changed hands (cash, mobile money, card terminal slip, bank transfer) and keeps the reference you type. Amounts are whole shillings, the hotel currency label can change in Settings, but there are never decimals.

Receptionists can open the screen and read every folio; recording money needs Payments at Can edit (Accountant, Hotel Manager, Restaurant Manager by default) and refunds need Full.

The page has two tabs. Stay is the folios: the invoice list in three shapes plus a Receiptsview that lists every payment and refund across invoices with the receipt PDF on each row. Restaurantlists every tender taken at the till (cash, mobile money, card, and room charges marked as such) with the ticket receipt on each row; clicking a row opens the ticket. Both tabs live in the address bar.

The folio drawer

Clicking a row opens a drawer titled with the invoice code (e.g. INV-0412) and the guest and booking under it. Left: status badge, issued and due tags, the line items (Item · Qty · Amount) and a dark totals card (Total · Paid · Balance). Right: the Payment history: one entry per payment or refund with method, network, reference, code, date and who received it, and a print and a download icon for that payment's receipt. Footer buttons: Close, Print, Download, Email,Record payment (only while a balance is owed) and, once the payment form is open, Save payment.

Empty state: “No invoices yet. A folio opens at check-in, and a deposit invoice when a booking is confirmed”.

An invoice is a header (issue date, due date, totals, a cached status) plus lines of a kind:room, tax, deposit, fee, pos,adjustment, other. Where each comes from:

1. 1
   Confirmation, deposit invoice

   If the hotel has a deposit % (Settings → Hotel), confirming a booking opens an invoice with one line “Deposit <pct>% · BK-…”. Issue and due date are the hotel-local day it was raised. The guest can pay it now; it shows as Pending, Partially Paid or Paid like any other.
2. 2
   Check-in, the stay lands on the same invoice

   Check-in appends “Accommodation · BK-… · <room type> × N nights” and the tax lines “Service charge X%”, “VAT X%”, “Tourism levy X%” (only those with a non-zero rate). If a deposit invoice already exists it is reused: every deposit line is offset by an equal negative line “Deposit applied to stay · BK-…”, so total = the stay, and whatever was paid on the deposit already counts toward it. The deposit is never charged twice.
3. 3
   During the stay, POS room charges

   A restaurant or bar ticket closed with Charge to Room posts “POS · TKT-… · <outlet>”, “Service charge · TKT-…” and “VAT · TKT-…” lines onto the open folio and raises its total. A folio that was already Paid becomes Partially Paid again.
4. 4
   One bill for everything

   The PDF button on the folio prints the guest bill: Accommodation (nights, deposits, fees), Restaurant & Bar (every ticket charged to the room with the items actually ordered, their accompaniments and who served), Other charges, then the totals box, payments received and the balance banner. It is the one receipt a guest takes home for the room, the kitchen and the bar.
5. 5
   Cancellation / no-show, the money comes back first

   Every deposit or prepayment line on the open invoice is offset by an equal “Deposit released · BK-…” credit, then the fee posts with its tax: cancellation as the hotel's percentage of the stay, no-show as the percentage of the first night. Each fee posts once per booking. If the guest had paid more than the fee, the folio shows “Refund due UGX …”; issue it from Payment history.
6. 6
   Fees, comps and corrections

   Adjust (Payments Full) posts one line by hand: a Fee (late check-out, damage, extras) or an Adjustment (a comp or a correction, negative to credit the guest), taxable or not. It works on a closed folio too, so a bill can be put right after check-out; every line is audited as invoice.adjusted.
7. 7
   Leaving early, a longer stay

   Moving the dates of a checked-in booking, or checking a guest out before the booked date, posts the difference as one “Stay adjusted · BK-…” room line with its tax, positive or negative. The folio's due date follows the new check-out, so an in-house guest is never overdue.
8. 8
   Check-out, the folio closes

   Check-out closes every open invoice on the booking: no more charges can land on it, but it stays payable until settled. Adjust can still correct it afterwards.

The tax chain

Totals are computed in one fixed order and rounded at every step: discount on the subtotal → service charge on the discounted subtotal → VAT on (discounted subtotal + service) → tourism levy on the discounted subtotal → total. Rates are the hotel's percentages in Settings; a POS outlet may override the service % for its own tickets.

1. 1
   Open the folio

   Click the invoice row. Check the Balance figure in the dark card, that is what can be collected. On a tax-inclusive hotel (Settings → Hotel) the tax rows read “Includes VAT 18%” and are part of the lines above them, not added on top.
2. 2
   Click Record payment

   The button is in the drawer footer and only shows while the balance is above zero. The Amount field is pre-filled with the full balance.
3. 3
   Enter the amount

   Whole shillings only; commas and spaces are stripped. A part-payment is fine, the invoice becomes Partially Paid and Record payment stays available for the rest.
4. 4
   Choose the method

   Cash · Mobile Money · Card · Bank Transfer. Mobile Money asks for the Network (MTN or AIRTEL). Every method except Cash shows a Reference no. field (“Transaction / slip reference”), type the MoMo transaction id, card auth code or transfer reference so the audit trail can be matched to the bank.
5. 5
   Save payment

   A PAY-… code is issued, the invoice status is re-derived, a notification is raised (“Payment received on INV-…” or “Invoice INV-… settled”) and the toast reads “Payment of UGX … recorded on INV-…”.

A refund is a payment entry with a negative effect, linked to the payment it reverses. It cannot exceed what is still refundable on that payment, nor what has been collected on the invoice overall.

1. 1
   Find the payment in Payment history

   Each non-refund entry with something left shows a Refund chip; if part of it was already returned the chip reads Refund rest. A fully returned payment shows a Refunded badge instead.
2. 2
   Click Refund

   A confirm dialog titled “Refund PAY-…?” explains: “This refunds whatever is still outstanding on the payment. The guest balance will increase.”
3. 3
   Issue refund

   The refund is created with the same method and reference as the original, a new PAY-… code, written to the audit log as payment.refunded, and the folio status is re-derived (Refunded once net paid reaches zero).

The rule lives on the booking, but it is a payments rule: Check out on the booking drawer refuses while any open folio on that booking has a balance. The 409 names the invoices and the total, for example “INV-0412 still owes UGX 240,000. Collect it before check-out, or a Payments manager can check out and bill later”.

1. 1
   Usual path, collect first

   Open Payments, record the balance, then check the guest out. The folio is closed at check-out and shows Paid.
2. 2
   Exception, settle later

   Bill-to-company or a disputed charge: a user with Payments Full sees a confirm on the booking drawer to check out anyway. The booking is checked out, the action is audited as booking.checkedout_unsettled, and the folio is closed to new charges but stays open for collection here.
3. 3
   Collect afterwards

   The invoice keeps its status (Pending, Partially Paid, and Overdue once the due date passes). Record payment works exactly as during the stay.

• Pending: nothing received yet.
• Partially Paid: net paid (payments minus refunds) is above zero but below the total.
• Paid: net paid ≥ total.
• Refunded: at least one refund exists and net paid is back at zero or below.
• Overdue: Pending or Partially Paid and the due date is before the hotel's today. This one is derived on every read: list, drawer, PDF, search, the booking drawer and the night audit, and is never written to the database.

• Open the list, open a folio, Print (PDF): Payments · View only.
• Record payment, Email invoice: Payments · Can edit.
• Refund: Payments · Full access.
• Check out with a balance (settle later): Payments · Full access, from the booking drawer (Bookings · Can edit for the check-out itself).

The POS terminal, Restaurant and Inventory share the Payments module, so a Restaurant Manager (Can edit) can record a folio payment here even though their day is spent on tickets.

Folio

The invoice attached to a booking that collects the stay, taxes, deposits, fees and POS charges. Opens at confirmation (deposit) or check-in; closes at check-out.

Deposit

A percentage of the stay requested at confirmation as a deposit line. At check-in it is offset by an equal “Deposit applied” credit so it is never charged twice.

Net paid

Payments minus refunds on an invoice.

Balance

Total minus net paid, never below zero.

Overdue

Derived: unpaid or part-paid and due before the hotel's today. Never stored.

Settle later

A Payments-Full override that checks a guest out with a balance; audited; the folio stays collectable.

The POS terminal is the screen a server stands at. Each hotel has one or more outlets (a restaurant, a bar; a small hotel has just the one) with their own menu, tables and service-charge rate. An outlet is a menu and a bill; where the work is done is the station on the dish, kitchen or bar. The till shows every menu at once, so a table's food and its drinks go on one ticket and each line reaches the board that makes it. A sale is a ticket of lines; lines are sent to the kitchen, adjusted, voided with a reason, discounted, split, and finally settled by one or more tenders, cash, mobile money, card, or a charge to an in-house guest's room folio. Several orders stay open side by side: the Open orders strip under the outlet switch lists every open ticket in the hotel (naming the outlet when more than one has orders open), and a tap brings it back onto the panel, so a waiter can work three tables at once.

The terminal sits under the Restaurant permission module. Anyone with Restaurant at Can edit (a Waiter, a Chef, the Receptionist) can ring, send and print the bill; Restaurant at View only sees the ticket and totals but no buttons. Settling a bill (taking cash, mobile money, card or a room charge) is Restaurant at Full: the Cashier, the Restaurant Manager and the managers. A waiter sees Print billwhere Pay would be and takes the bill to the cashier. Cancelling an order that already went to the kitchen, editing the menu and closing a shift also need Restaurant at Full. A flagged discount or a refund asked for by somebody without that level opens an Approve dialog: pick a manager from the list and they tap their own four-digit approval PIN. Nobody signs out, and the audit row names both people. Voiding a line the kitchen already has needs no manager: anyone who can ring gives a reason, and the audit log records who voided it and why.

If the hotel has no outlet the page shows “No POS outlet configured for this hotel.” Outlets, tables and menus are seeded per hotel; the per-outlet service % and the discount and void-reason lists are edited in Settings → Ops config.

A shift (code SHF-…) is opened per outlet with an opening float and closed with an optional cash count. Only one shift can be open per outlet at a time, the server locks the outlet while it checks, and a database constraint backs it up, so two managers opening at once get one shift, not two.

1. 1
   Open

   Open shift (Restaurant · Full access, next to the outlet chips) asks for the opening float, the cash in the drawer before the first sale. The terminal then shows the green shift chip with the code and who opened it; without one it reads “No shift open”.
2. 2
   Trade

   Every ticket that closes on the outlet is stamped with the shift. By default the till still sells without a shift; Settings → Hotel → “Require an open shift to take money at the till” makes cash, card and mobile money refuse (“No shift is open on this outlet”) until one is opened.
3. 3
   Close

   Close shift opens the drawer count: a row per note (50,000 down to 100 shillings) with a count, plus closing notes. If tickets are still open the close is refused and offers “Close the shift anyway”, in which case their money rolls to the next shift and the report says so.
4. 4
   Read the Z-report

   Tickets (and refunds), gross sales, discounts, voids, a line per tender method, the opening float, the cash expected in the drawer (float plus the net cash taken, change and refunds already netted), the cash counted, and Balanced / Over / Short. The same report is stored with the shift and audited.

1. 1
   Start

   Tap a menu tile, click Pick table, or click New ticket. If no open ticket is selected, the first tap creates one (TKT-…, 1 cover) on the current outlet. The terminal reopens the most recent open ticket for the outlet when you return.
2. 2
   Table or walk-in

   Pick table opens the floor by zone; each tile shows the number, seats and status. Choose a table, or Walk-in / no table. The table turns “open”; moving the ticket elsewhere frees the old table.
3. 3
   Room service

   A ticket created against an in-house room (roomId) is linked to that guest's booking and shows a Room N · guest banner. The link is also made at payment time if you choose Charge to Room.
4. 4
   Add items

   Tapping a plain item adds one straight away (“Added <name>”). Items with options open the modifier sheet.
5. 5
   Quantities

   Use the − / + stepper on a line (1–99). Taking an unsent line to zero deletes it; taking a sent line to zero opens the void dialog instead.
6. 6
   Covers

   The Covers stepper (1–20) sets how many guests; it also decides how many ways Split evenly divides the bill.

The modifier sheet

Titled with the item name and “Choose options · UGX … base”. Each modifier group is a row of chips; a group marked · required must have a choice (single-choice required groups preselect the first option), · choose any allows several. Price deltas show as +2K / −1K on the chip. Below is theKitchen / bar note (“e.g. allergy, no peanuts”), a quantity stepper and the running unit × qty price. Add to ticket stays disabled until every required group has a choice.

Send

1. 1
   Check the badge

   The ticket head shows “N to send” in purple while unsent lines exist; once everything is fired it shows the kitchen status instead.
2. 2
   Click Send (N)

   All unsent, non-voided lines are marked sent; the ticket's kitchen status moves from new to preparing if it was new. Toast: “N items sent to kitchen”. The kitchen sees it on the Restaurant order board immediately.
3. 3
   Add more later

   New lines start unsent; Send fires just those. A second course on an order the kitchen already marked Ready or Served puts the ticket back into Cooking on the kitchen display. Send is disabled when nothing is waiting (“No unsent lines” if forced).
4. 4
   Watch each line come back

   Every sent line carries a word from the pass: in kitchen, ready or served; the header badge reads “2 of 3 ready” until the last plate is up, then the ticket's kitchen status. The open-orders strip shows “ready” on a ticket whose food is all up. Print bill prints the same word beside each item.

Void a line

Click the bin icon on a line (or step a sent line to zero). The Void item dialog shows “2 × Chicken curry · UGX 48,000” and the reason list from Settings (defaults: Guest changed mind · Wrong item rung · Item sold out · Quality complaint · Duplicate entry · Manager comp).Keep item cancels; Void item confirms.

Discounts

The select under the lines lists the hotel's discounts (defaults: No discount · Staff meal 30% (auth) · Happy hour 20% · Loyalty member 10% · Manager comp 100% (auth)). A discount applies to the whole ticket subtotal and shows as a red line with its label; the ticket copies the label and % so later edits to the list do not change old tickets.

1. 1
   Pick a discount

   Ones without “(auth)” apply immediately, and so do the flagged ones when you hold Restaurant at Full yourself.
2. 2
   Ask a manager

   Ones marked “(auth)” open the Discount authorisation dialog. Approved by lists everyone who may sign this off and has an approval PIN set, and the field below takes their PIN. Approve sends the name and the PIN with the request.
3. 3
   Server check

   The approver must be an active user of this hotel holding Restaurant, Payments or Settings at Full access, and the PIN must be theirs. On success the toast says “Discount applied”; the audit row names you and them.

Merge bills

Merge (next to Split) lists every other open ticket in the hotel, the same table or room first: the bar's tab, a second kitchen ticket, room service. Tick the ones that belong to this guest and they fold into this bill with their lines, sent state and station intact; the other tickets are cancelled with the note “Merged into TKT-…”. A ticket that already has money on it cannot be merged until its tenders are removed. One bill, one receipt, one payment.

Split bill

Split opens “Split bill · TKT-… · table · UGX … due” with three modes.Evenly asks for the number of guests (it starts at the covers, 2 to 20, and can differ from them) and divides every line that many ways, creating one child ticket per extra guest with the same table, room and discount; guest 1 stays on the original, which keeps the odd shillings. By amount lists guest 2 onwards with an amount box each (Another guest adds a row, Equal shares fills them evenly): every amount becomes a ticket of its own carrying one “Share of TKT-…” line, and guest 1 keeps the food and whatever is left, shown live at the top; the amounts must leave something for guest 1. By item lets you tick lines and Move to new ticket; the panel shows what goes and what stays. Each child is a normal ticket paid separately; a share ticket cannot be edited, only paid or cancelled, and it pays only once the pass has marked the parent's food ready.

Pay (enabled once the ticket has a live line) opens the Take payment drawer. With the hotel settingTake money only after the kitchen marks the food ready (on by default) the drawer first lists any kitchen dish that is unsent or still cooking, and the server refuses the tender (“2 items not ready: … still in the kitchen”) until the pass marks them ready; drinks never hold a bill, and Restaurant · Full access may take the money anyway, which is written to the audit log. The drawer shows: “TKT-… · table · outlet”, the bill card (total, paid so far, balance due), the tenders already taken on this bill, four tender tiles, and a right-hand panel that changes with the tender. The amount defaults to the balance; type a smaller figure to take part of it, and the drawer reads “Take UGX … · UGX … left”.

1. 1
   Choose the tender, the amount and fill its field

   The button stays disabled until the tender's rule is met. A partial amount reads “Take UGX … · UGX … left”.
2. 2
   Take UGX …

   A tender row is written for what was applied to the bill (never more than the balance), the ticket stays open with the balance on the panel, the audit log gets pos.tender.taken, and the drawer lists the tender under “Taken on this bill” with an × to remove it if it was a slip.
3. 3
   Settle UGX …

   The tender that brings the balance to zero closes the ticket: its table goes to “needs bussing”, the audit log gets pos.ticket.closed with method, total and the number of tenders. Two guests paying their halves are simply two tenders.
4. 4
   Print the bill first

   Print bill on the ticket panel opens the ticket as a BILL (not yet paid) to take to the table; nothing is settled by printing. The Restaurant page's Tickets tab has the same Bill or Receipt button on every row, plus a Download that saves the PDF.
5. 5
   Receipt

   The receipt PDF opens in a new tab (/api/pos/tickets/<id>/pdf), laid out for the paper set in Settings (an 80 mm roll by default): the hotel and its TIN, the outlet, the ticket code and time, table or room, covers, Served by (whoever opened the ticket) and Cashier (whoever settled it, when that is someone else), each line with its unit price, discount, service, VAT, total, every tender and the change, then the hotel's own footer. A second print says Reprint. Toast: “Bill settled” or “Posted to guest folio”.
6. 6
   Stock

   Every live line with a recipe depletes its stock items. Stock never goes below zero: the decrement is clamped to what is on hand, the movement records what was actually taken, and any shortfall raises the notification “Stock short: <item>” (“TKT-… needed 6 but only 4 was on hand · count and adjust”). The sale itself is never blocked.

Every edit, lines, covers, table, void, discount, split, send, needs the ticket to be Open; a closed ticket answers “Ticket is closed”. Cancel on the ticket head cancels an open order nothing has been paid on: anyone who can ring up may cancel a ticket the kitchen has not seen; once items were sent, only Restaurant at Full may, and every sent line is voided with the reason. A cancelled ticket keeps its code and disappears from the open orders strip. Closing a ticket with a kitchen status of new moves it topreparing so the kitchen still sees it. The kitchen flow itself (new → preparing → ready → served) is driven from the Restaurant & kitchen boards.

The terminal itself only writes free, open and bill; seated and dirtyexist for the floor picker's colours and for seeded data.

• See the terminal, menu, tables, tickets, shift and receipts: Restaurant · View only.
• New ticket, add/adjust/remove unsent lines, table, covers, Send, void any line with a reason, discount, split, merge, Print bill, cancel an unsent ticket: Restaurant · Can edit (the Waiter).
• Settle a bill (Pay: cash, mobile money, card, room charge), open and close shifts, remove a tender, cancel a sent ticket, rename or resize tables, refund a closed ticket: Restaurant · Full access (the Cashier, the Restaurant Manager, the managers). A refund can also be approved by somebody who holds it, with their PIN.
• Kitchen status (Start cooking / Mark ready / Mark served): Kitchen · Can edit or Restaurant · Can edit.
• Approve an “(auth)” discount: the name picked in the dialog needs Restaurant · Full, Payments · Full or Settings · Full, and an approval PIN set in Staff → Accounts.
• Approve a refund: the name picked needs Restaurant · Full (the Restaurant Manager, the Cashier, a manager).
• Edit discounts, void reasons and outlet service %: Settings · Can edit, in Settings → Ops config.

Outlet

A selling point (restaurant, bar) with its own menu, tables, service % and shifts.

Ticket

One bill (TKT-…): lines, discount, totals, one tender. Open until settled.

Cover

A guest at the table; sets how many ways Split evenly divides.

Sold out

Off the menu for now (kitchens call it 86'd). A sold-out dish cannot be rung and is hidden on the till until it is back on sale.

Tender

How a ticket is settled. The terminal offers Cash, Mobile Money, Card and Charge to Room; the shared tender enum also lists cash, momo, card, room, voucher, staff for reporting.

Room charge

A tender that posts the ticket to the in-house guest's open folio; settled at check-out.

Shift

An opened/closed trading period per outlet (SHF-…) with a float and a close report.

Rung twice, wrong table, a guest who sent the dish back after paying: the bill has to come back out of the till, and the books have to show it. Restaurant → Tickets shows a Refund button on every closed ticket that was paid at the till.

1. 1
   Click Refund

   The dialog “Refund TKT-…?” asks for a Reason (required, it goes on the audit trail and the receipt) and whether to Return the ingredients to stock (ticked by default; untick when the food actually left the kitchen).
2. 2
   Confirm “Refund UGX …”

   Every tender on the ticket is mirrored as a negative tender of the same method, the ticket is stamped refunded with who did it, and the toast reads “TKT-… refunded”. The row shows a Refunded badge and the ticket drops out of Sales today, the reports and the night audit.
3. 3
   Hand the money back

   The receipt (Print) now carries a REFUNDED band and the negative tender rows; give it to the guest with the cash. A shift cash-up nets the refund against the day's cash.

Restaurant / POS is where orders are cooked and the menu is managed; the ringing and paying happens on the POS terminal. Tickets flow from the till onto the Order board here, the kitchen advances them through preparing and ready, and the waiter marks them served. The Menu tab lists every category and item for the selected outlet with a sold-out switch, and shows supervisor notes left over from the menu import.

Like the terminal, this screen is guarded by the Payments module: View only reads the boards, Can edit advances tickets and changes menu items.

• Outlet switch: the same buttons as the terminal; the board and menu show one outlet at a time.
• Tickets (the default): every open ticket of the outlet plus the recent closed ones in one table (ticket, table or room, guest, covers, items, total, kitchen status, opened). Tap a heading to sort; the Kitchen heading filters by status; the last column advances an open ticket, and tapping an open row opens that order on the till.
• Order board: four kanban columns; cards can be dragged one column to the right or advanced with the button.
• Menu: the outlet's items as a paged list (Table, Cards or By category), searchable and filterable by category, availability and popular; inline cells for category, price, popular and 86; a drawer for the full item; Add item and Categories dialogs; and, when any exist, a MENU_NOTES side card of unresolved supervisor flags with a Resolved button.
• Tables: the floor as status cards (Free, Seated, Order open, Bill out, Needs bussing) filtered by state and zone. Free, Seated and Needs bussing are set by hand; Order open and Bill out follow the ticket, and closing a bill leaves the table at Needs bussing until it is cleared.
• Kitchen display (the first tab and the default): the screen at the pass. Three shelves, To make, Ready to serve and Today, a station switch (Kitchen, Bar, All stations) carrying the number of items each board still owes, a Sound on / off chip, and large cards that show every line for that station with its accompaniments and notes, a Ready button per line (Undo once pressed), how long the order has waited, and one big button for the next step. A new order chimes; an order nobody has started taps every minute. Shares from a bill split by amount and the copies an even split keeps for billing never appear here.

Without an outlet the page shows “No POS outlet configured for this hotel.”

1. 1
   The ticket appears

   As soon as a waiter creates a ticket at the till it shows under New Orders with “No items yet” until lines are added. Room-service tickets are labelled Room N; table tickets Table N; walk-ins by code.
2. 2
   The till sends

   Send on the terminal marks the lines sent and moves a new ticket to Preparing. Lines added afterwards show up on the card as they are sent.
3. 3
   Start cooking (kitchen)

   If the ticket is still in New Orders, e.g. lines were rung but never sent, the kitchen presses Start cooking. This marks every line on the ticket sent and moves it to Preparing.
4. 4
   Ready, one plate at a time

   On the kitchen display each line has a Ready button; the line turns green on the till at once. When the last kitchen line is ready the ticket moves to Ready by itself and the waiter is told. Undo puts a line back to cooking (and the ticket back to Preparing).
5. 5
   Mark ready

   Food is plated: press Mark ready (board or kitchen display) to stamp every line at once. The Ready to serve KPI counts these. The till takes no money for a kitchen dish until it reads ready.
6. 6
   Mark served

   The runner delivers and presses Mark served on the board. The card sits in Served until the ticket is settled at the till, which takes it off the open-ticket board.

It is the first tab of Restaurant / POS and the screen the page opens on. Each card is one order: where it is (Table 4, Room 07, walk-in), its code, covers and guest, the outlet, and a timer that counts from the moment the first line was fired (green, then amber after 15 minutes, red after 30). Underneath, every line the station has to make, as the cook reads it: 2× Stir Fry Chicken, then the accompaniments on their own line (“+ Chips, Extra sauce”) and any note from the till in amber (“no peanuts”). Lines the waiter has not sent yet are shown faded with a “not sent yet” tag, so nothing is cooked early.

“Nothing to make” means the pass is clear. The timers keep moving without a refresh; new orders and changes arrive live from the till.

Categories and items

Each outlet has ordered categories (Mains, Breakfast, Snacks, Drinks… each with an icon) and ordereditems inside them. An item carries a name, description, whole-shilling price, an availableflag and a popular flag (the star on the till and the Popular rail). Modifier groups, required or optional, single or multi-choice, each option with a price delta, are attached to items and shown on the till's modifier sheet.

Finding and editing items

1. 1
   Open the Menu tab

   Pick the outlet. The list is paged (50 a page, Table by default; Cards or By category from the layout switch) and searches name, description and category as you type; the Category, Availability and Popular filters and the sortable headings live in the address bar.
2. 2
   Quick edits in the row

   Category, price, Popular and the Available / Sold out switch save on change. A sold-out dish vanishes from the till at once (“<name> is sold out”) but stays on tickets that already sold it.
3. 3
   The item drawer

   Click the item name: rename, describe, re-price, move category, flip availability and popular, tick the modifier groups the till should offer, and see the recipe. Payments · Full access can delete an item that was never sold.
4. 4
   Add item and Categories

   Add item asks for name, price, category, description, flags and modifier groups. Categories renames, re-orders (the till follows this order), sets icons, adds and, when empty, deletes categories.
5. 5
   Several at once

   Tick rows to mark them sold out or back on sale, popular, or move them to another category in one go.

Recipes → stock

An item can hold a recipe: up to 20 lines of stock item + quantity per portion. When a ticket is settled at the till, every live line depletes its recipe quantities from Inventory (a consumemovement referencing the ticket). Stock is clamped at zero and a shortfall raises “Stock short: <item>” so the storekeeper counts and adjusts, the sale is never blocked. Items without a recipe simply do not touch stock.

MENU_NOTES

When a menu was imported, the importer may have left supervisor flags (section, item, issue). Unresolved ones show in the side card “MENU_NOTES · Supervisor flags from menu import” so the manager can fix the item; the Resolved button on a note closes it.

There is no separate floor map on this screen. Tables are defined per outlet (number, zone, seats) and are assigned to a ticket on the terminal with Pick table, which groups them by zone and colours them by status (free · seated · open · bill · dirty). The order board uses that assignment to label cardsTable N and tag them Dine-in; a ticket linked to an in-house room shows Room N andRoom Service; anything else is a Walk-in shown by its code.

Room-service tickets can be settled with Charge to Room at the till, which posts the food, service charge and VAT onto the guest's folio, see Payments & folios.

The KPI tiles derive from these: In kitchen counts preparing, Ready to serve counts ready,Orders today counts tickets created today (any status), Sales today sums today's closed tickets. The board shows open tickets only; a settled ticket leaves the board whatever its kitchen state.

• Open the screen, read boards, tickets, menu, notes, recipes: Restaurant · View only (the Chef, the Accountant).
• Start cooking / Mark ready / Mark served, Ready on a line, drag cards: Kitchen · Can edit (the Chef) or Restaurant · Can edit (the Waiter, the desk). Marking an order ready, by the button or by its last line, sends a personal “Order ready” alert to the waiter who took it, with a chime on their device.
• Mark sold out / back on sale, resolve notes: Restaurant · Can edit.
• Create or delete dishes, change prices, names, categories or options, set recipes, add or rename categories: Restaurant · Full access (the Restaurant Manager).

Receptionists (Restaurant · Can edit) can ring a room-service order and move a card; they cannot change the menu.

KDS

Kitchen display system, the kitchen status on a ticket and the screens that show it.

Sold out

Off the menu for now (kitchen slang: 86'd). A sold-out dish is hidden on the till and cannot be rung.

Pass

Where plated food waits for a runner; the Ready column.

Recipe

Stock item quantities consumed per portion of a menu item; depleted when the ticket settles.

Room service

A ticket linked to an in-house room; can be charged to the guest folio.

Notifications tell the team what just happened: a new booking, a payment, a room turned dirty, a stock item running out, an export ready. Most entries are hotel-wide, and each person sees those that belong to a module they can open: a waiter sees kitchen and order alerts but not “Payment received on INV-…”, an accountant the reverse. Personal ones (“Order ready: Table 4” for the waiter who took the order, your test notification) reach one person only, on every device they are signed in on. Read state is per person: marking an alert read for you does not clear it for a colleague.

There is no permission gate: the feed, the bell and the preferences are available to every role, because the feed only tells you where to look, the module you click through to still enforces its own access.

The bell

• The bell in the top bar carries a live unread count. Clicking it opens a panel, a popover on desktop, a bottom sheet on phones, titled Notifications with the twelve most recent entries, Mark all read, a close ×, and View all to open this page.
• New alerts are prepended to the panel as they arrive. Esc or clicking outside closes it. When empty it reads “Nothing new. Events appear here as they happen.”

The feed loads the latest 100 entries. Empty states: “No payments notifications.” when a chip filter has nothing; otherwise “Nothing here yet. Bookings, check-ins and payments will appear as they happen.” or, if you have not turned on device alerts in a browser that supports them, a prompt to do so with an Open notification settings button.

1. 1
   Open Settings → Notifications

   Or click Preferences on the feed page.
2. 2
   Click the chip beside a category

   It toggles between On (green) and Muted (dimmed). The change saves immediately and rolls back with a toast if it fails.
3. 3
   Muted means gone from every channel

   “Muted categories are hidden from your feed, badge, toasts and device alerts, for this account only.” The rows are still written for the hotel, so un-muting brings history back.

• Tab focused: a toast slides in with the title, body and a link; the bell count goes up by one. No OS banner.
• Tab open but hidden (another tab, minimised), with Device alerts on, the browser shows a system notification from the live event. Clicking it focuses the app and opens the linked module. This path needs no server configuration.
• App closed or phone locked: the server sends a Web Push message to every device you enabled; the service worker shows the banner unless a focused app window already exists. This needs VAPID keys on the server, Settings tells you when they are missing: “OS banners work while a tab is open. Ask your admin to set VAPID keys for alerts when the app is closed.”
• All three respect your category mutes.

1. 1
   Open Settings → Notifications → Device alerts

   The card reads “Off for this browser” or “On for this browser” with a hint that explains what will happen on this device.
2. 2
   Click the Off/On chip

   The browser asks for notification permission. Allow it. When server push is configured the device is registered too. Toast: “Device alerts on, you will get banners when the app is in the background” (or “…on for this browser (server push is not configured yet)”).
3. 3
   Click Send test

   A “Test notification, Device alerts are working on this browser.” entry is written to your personal System feed and pushed to your devices even if System is muted. The toast says “Hide this tab (or lock your phone) to see the OS banner as well.” when the tab is visible, or “Check your notification tray.” when it is not.
4. 4
   Turn off any time

   Click the chip again: the device is unregistered and you see “Device alerts off for this browser”. The setting is per browser and per device, not per account.

Clicking marks the alert read first (optimistically, the page does not wait for the server), then navigates. OS banners and Web Push banners carry the same link and open it in the app.

Toast

The small in-app message that slides in while the tab is focused.

OS banner

A system notification shown by the browser or phone outside the app window.

Web Push

Server-sent notifications that arrive even when the app is closed; needs VAPID keys on the server.

Device alerts

The per-browser switch in Settings → Notifications that enables OS banners and Web Push.

Settings has six tabs: Account, Hotel, Branding & locale, Ops config, Notifications and Numbering. Account and Notifications are personal and open for every role. The other four describe the hotel and need Settings access: View to read, Edit to change most fields, Full for the handful that can break things, currency, timezone, the front-desk PIN and the numbering counters.

By default only the Super Admin has Settings = Full. The Hotel Manager has Edit, the HR Manager has View, and everybody else sees just Account and Notifications. Every hotel-level change is written to the audit log as a settings.* event.

Deep link a tab with /settings?tab=notifications (ids: account, hotel, branding, ops, notifications, numbering); the Preferences button on the Notifications page does exactly that.

1. 1
   Click Change password

   Three fields unfold: Current password, New password (min 8) and Confirm new password.
2. 2
   Click Update password

   The page checks “New password must be at least 8 characters” and “Passwords don't match” before sending. The server verifies the current password.
3. 3
   Other devices are signed out

   Toast: “Password changed. Other devices were signed out”. Every other session's refresh token is revoked; this browser gets a fresh one and stays in. The change is audited as user.password.changed.

Appearance: Light or Dark. “Theme is saved per device”, meaning it lives in this browser, not on your account, and the moon/sun icon in the top bar toggles the same setting.

Edit any field and click Save changes (top right; Settings Edit). Toast: “Settings saved”.

Amenities on offer is the list the room-type picker shows (M9.1). Press the box, tick what this hotel has: the dropdown is grouped and every row is a checkbox, and each ticked one also appears as a chip with its icon and an x. Leave it empty and every amenity the system knows is offered, which is what a full-service hotel wants; a lodge narrows it to the handful it has. Taking one off the list never strips it from a room type that already carries it. It saves with Save changes.

Rate plans lists every plan (code, name and kind, BAR, weekend, promo…) with its percentage adjustment; change the number and click Save on that row (toast “WKND saved”). New plans are created from the rate-plan API, not here. The bin deletes a plan no booking was quoted on.

Logo

• “PNG, JPEG or WebP. Downscaled to 512px; max 200KB after that.” Click Upload logo, pick a file; the browser scales it to 512 px on the long edge and saves it at once (toast “Logo updated”). Remove clears it (“Logo removed”). Settings Edit.
• Too complex an image after scaling gives “Logo too large even after downscaling. Try a simpler image”; an unreadable file gives “Could not read that image”.
• The logo is stored with the hotel profile (no file server) and appears in the sidebar and on exports. The audit log records “(image updated)”, never the image.

Theme

• Theme picks the colour set and the display font for every screen and every PDF letterhead; the change applies as soon as you save (toast “Theme saved”).
• Tagline is the headline on the sign-in page of a live hotel (up to 140 characters); leave it empty for the standard line.

Locale

• Timezone (IANA): a list of every zone the browser knows (Africa/Kampala, Africa/Nairobi…). It defines the hotel's business date for check-ins, night audit, reports and the audit log.
• Currency code: three capital letters (UGX, KES…). Client check: “Currency must be a 3-letter code like UGX or KES”.
• Both need Settings Full: the fields are disabled otherwise and the note adds “Changing currency or timezone needs full Settings access.” Click Save locale (toast “Locale saved”); the sidebar and money labels refresh immediately.

Everything on this tab needs Settings Edit. Rename fields save on blur or Enter; the + button beside each “New …” box adds a row.

• POS discounts: “Deactivate rather than delete. Tickets copy label & %”. Each row: label (2–60 chars), whole-number % (0–100), an Auth chip (amber when the discount “Requires supervisor authorization” at the till) and Active / Off. Add with “New discount label” + “%”.
• POS void reasons: “Offered when a ticket line is voided”. Label (2–80 chars) with Active / Off. Add with “New void reason”.
• Housekeeping checklist: “Template applied to every new cleaning task”. Steps with Active / Off; add with “New checklist step”. “Changes apply to tasks created from now on; open tasks keep their checklist.”
• Outlet service charge: “Overrides the hotel service % on POS folios”, with one “% svc” box per POS outlet (0–50). Shows “No POS outlets configured.” when there are none.
• Departments, suppliers & categories: “Create and rename only. Rows stay referenced by history”. Staff departments, Suppliers and Inventory categories, each with a rename box per row and a “New department” / “New supplier” / “New category” box. Names must be unique (2–60 characters; suppliers up to 80).

Two cards: Device alerts (the On/Off chip and Send test) and Categories (Bookings, Payments, Operations, System with On / Muted chips). Both are personal, no Settings access needed. Full detail in Notifications → Turning on Device alerts.

“Prefixes are fixed; the next counter can only move upward (lowering it would duplicate codes)”. The table lists Documents, Prefix, Next code and Next value for: Bookings (BK-), Invoices (INV-), Payments (PAY-), Guests (G-), Housekeeping tasks (HK-), Maintenance orders (M-), POS tickets (TKT-), Purchase orders (PO-), POS shifts (SHF-), Staff records (S-) and Leave requests (LV-).

1. 1
   Type the new Next value

   Settings Full only; others see the number and “Editing counters needs full Settings access.”
2. 2
   Press Enter or click away

   The counter saves on blur. Toast: “BK counter moved to 5000”.
3. 3
   Lower values are refused

   “Next value must be above the current 1042. Lowering it would duplicate codes”. The change is audited as settings.sequence.updated with from/to.

• None: Account and Notifications tabs only.
• View: read Hotel, Branding & locale, Ops config and Numbering.
• Edit: Save changes on Hotel, logo upload/remove, rate-plan adjustments, every Ops config list.
• Full: additionally currency, timezone, the front-desk PIN and numbering counters. Full also makes the role admin tier: it can manage roles and users and read the audit log, and the shared PIN can no longer sign in as it.

Business date / hotel day

The calendar day in the hotel's timezone; check-in dates, night audit and reports all use it.

Sequence

The per-hotel counter behind a document prefix such as BK- or INV-.

Soft delete

Switching a list row to Off so it stops being offered but stays referenced by past tickets and tasks.

The app installs a small service worker that caches its own files and every screen you have openedon this device. If you reload one with no network, the page still opens. Every list the app fetched while online is also kept on the device, so the menu, the open orders, the rooms, the bookings and the rest render from the last copy the screen saw; the pill in the top bar then reads Offline · saved 14:05(or Showing saved 14:05 once the connection is back but a screen still shows old data) so nobody mistakes a stale list for a live one. Installed as an app, it opens in full screen like a native till.

• Dashboard: shows the cached rooms, bookings and summary with a “saved at” time.
• Bookings: the pipeline board and drawers open from the cached window; queued check-ins and check-outs are already projected onto the cards.
• Rooms: the room grid with cached statuses; queued out-of-service changes appear immediately.
• Housekeeping: the task board and checklists from the cached task list.

Every other page (Guests, Payments, POS, Reports, Settings and the rest) reopens from cache too, showing the data it last loaded; anything that needs the server, such as searching or turning a page, waits for the connection. The API and the live-update socket are never cached, so nothing you see offline is ever older than the moment it was last fetched.

POS keeps selling. If the network drops mid-service the ticket panel switches to an Offline draft: you keep adding items from the cached menu and tap Pay as usual; the ticket is queued and posts when the connection returns, priced again from the live menu. Send to kitchen, Split, discounts and tables need a connection and are greyed out on a draft. The total shown on a draft is an estimate, before VAT.

When you press a button and the request cannot reach the API, the system checks whether that action is on the offline whitelist. Whitelisted actions are written to a local outbox in your browser (IndexedDB), the screen updates optimistically, and the toast says the action was queued rather than failed.

Everything else stays online-only: new bookings, new guests, new housekeeping tasks, work orders, payments, POS tickets, edits to dates or rooms, cancellations and no-shows. These mint new codes or move money and would duplicate on replay, so the button simply reports that you are offline. Take the details on paper and enter them once the Offline pill disappears.

The pill appears next to the quick-add button only when something needs saying:

• Offline (grey), the browser is offline or the live socket is down. Hover: “Working offline. Actions are queued locally”.
• Syncing (amber), you are back online and queued actions are being sent.
• Needs attention (red), at least one action could not be applied and is waiting for you.

The number on the pill is queued plus needs-attention rows. Click it to open the Offline activitydrawer, which has two lists:

1. 1
   Queued (n)

   Each row shows its label and “Captured 14:05”. Sync now forces a replay; the toast answers “All queued actions sent” or “Still offline. Will retry automatically”.
2. 2
   Needs attention (n)

   Rows the server refused, with the server's message and the context (guest, room). Resolve them manually, for example re-room the guest from Bookings, then press Dismiss.

Replay is triggered automatically when the browser comes back online, when the tab becomes visible again, when the live socket reconnects, and three seconds after the app starts. You rarely need Sync now.

The outbox groups rows by record, booking:…, room:…, hk:…: and replays each group strictly in order, so a queued check-out can never run before its check-in. Groups are independent: a problem on one booking does not hold up the room changes. Every flush starts by refreshing your session so the replay runs with a fresh cookie, and ends by reconnecting the live socket so every open screen refetches.

• Success: the row is removed.
• Converged: the server answered 409 but a quick check shows the record is already where you wanted it (the booking is checkedin, the task is already in that column, the room is already out of service). Another desk did it first. The row is dropped silently; nothing to do.
• Genuine conflict: a 409 whose state does not match, typically Room is already booked for those dates or Room 204 is unavailable. The row moves to Needs attention with the server's message. Open the booking, pick another room and check in again, then dismiss the row.
• Other refusals: 400, 403 (your role changed), 404 (the record was deleted) or a booking that was cancelled meanwhile. Also parked under Needs attention with the message; they can never succeed as queued.
• Network failure: the row stays queued and the whole flush stops until the next trigger.
• 401: the session could not be refreshed. The queue pauses and you are taken to sign-in; the rows are kept and replay after you sign in again.

Queued check-ins and check-outs carry an occurredAt stamp taken the moment you pressed the button. On replay the server uses it for the booking's check-in/out time and for the arrival-day rule, so the folio and the night audit reflect when the guest actually arrived, not when the network came back.

• The stamp must be within the last 48 hours and never in the future; older rows are refused with occurredAt must be within the last 48 hours and land in Needs attention.
• The booking's status history and the audit log keep who did it and when it was captured.
• Housekeeping and room changes do not carry a stamp; they take the time they are applied.

1. 1
   Desktop (Chrome or Edge)

   Open the app, then choose Install app from the address-bar menu. It appears as “HMS” in your apps and launches on the Dashboard.
2. 2
   Phone or tablet

   Use Add to Home Screen from the browser's share or menu. iPad Safari is supported; the queue works there too.
3. 3
   Updates

   When a new build is deployed, a bar at the bottom says “A new version is available.” Press Update to reload onto it, or Later to finish what you are doing first.

• ⌘K / Ctrl K: jump to the global search box on any screen. Two characters start the search; results are grouped into Bookings, Guests, Rooms and Invoices and only include modules you may see.
• ?: open this guide. Ignored while you are typing in a field or a dialog is open.
• /: while reading the guide, focus the guide search box.
• [ and ]: while reading the guide, go to the previous or next chapter.
• Esc: clears and leaves the global search; closes the mobile sidebar; closes the drawer or dialog on top; cancels an inline text edit without saving.
• Enter: saves an inline text cell (so does clicking away). In the Rooms and Settings number fields it also commits the value.
• Tab: the staff directory cards, inventory department chips and report shortcuts are keyboard-focusable; Enter activates them.

• Every paged list writes its state to the address: /payments?q=okello&status=overdue&page=2. Bookmark the “overdue invoices” view and open it each morning; paste it to a colleague and they land on the same rows.
• Defaults are stripped, so an untouched list has a clean address. Clear in the filter bar resets search and filters in one click.
• Back and Forward walk through your filter history without reloading the page.
• Column sort is in the URL too (sort=, dir=). Tap a column title to sort: first tap ascending, second descending, third clears; dates and amounts start descending. The small filter icon on a title opens a popover with that column's values, counts and presets.
• If rows disappear while you are on page 9 of 8, the list snaps back to the last real page by itself.

Views

• Every module opens on its table (list) view. Modules with more views (List, Cards, Pipeline, Board, Calendar, Grid, Floor and so on) remember your last choice per module in a cookie on this device; phones default to Cards.
• Add ?view=kanban (or grid, calendar…) to a link to force a view for whoever opens it; the URL wins over the remembered preference.

Rows per page

Change Rows (25 / 50 / 100) under any table once and every paged list on this device opens at that size from then on, including the very first server render, so there is no flash. The preference is a small cookie, like your theme.

• Inline selects: click a status, priority or assignee cell and pick; it saves at once with a small spinner. An error rolls the cell back and shows the server's message as a toast.
• Inline text: cells with a pencil on hover open an input; Enter or clicking away saves, Esc cancels. Money cells are right-aligned and formatted.
• Toggles: yes/no switches (active, blocks room…) flip and save on click.
• View-only: with View access the same cells render as plain text titled “View only”; nothing to unlearn when your role changes.
• Kanban drag: press and move a card more than a few pixels to start a drag; the target column highlights as you hover. Works with a mouse, touch and pen. Columns the card may not enter do not highlight. Clicking a card (without moving) still opens its drawer.
• Drag on a button, link or field inside the card does nothing, so you can use the card's own controls without accidentally moving it.

• Bookings, rooms, housekeeping, maintenance, POS tickets, invoices, staff, exports and notifications all refetch when someone else changes them. Paged lists refetch the current page in place, keeping your filters.
• The bell badge, toasts and the notifications page all update from the same feed; muted categories (Settings → Notifications) never toast.
• When the tab is in the background and device alerts are on, new alerts arrive as system notifications instead of toasts.
• The socket reconnecting is also what flips the Offline pill back and replays queued work (see the Offline chapter).

• Quick add (the plus icon), jumps to Bookings, where New booking is the first action. Fastest route to a walk-in.
• Dark mode: the moon/sun icon. The choice is a cookie, so it applies to the very first paint after a reload; no flash.
• User guide: the book icon or ?. The guide is public: send /guide/bookings#check-in to a new hire before their account exists.
• Bell: the last few alerts and a link to the full feed; the count is live.
• Sidebar: the panel icon collapses it to icons on desktop and slides it in on phones; Esc closes the mobile sidebar. A lock on a module means view-only for your role.
• Demo chip (demo sandbox only), shows the time left, switches you to any role in one click, and Reset my demo data throws the sandbox away and starts fresh.

• Print an invoice: open it in Payments and press Print in the drawer footer; the PDF opens in a new tab ready for the browser's print dialog. Email sends the same PDF to the guest's address on file.
• POS receipts: closed tickets have a receipt PDF the same way.
• Exports: Reports queue PDF/Excel files in the background; the Exports card lists them with status, kind and requester, and a live event marks each one done. Generated files are kept for 30 days.
• Print this guide: the chapter header has a Print button; the layout collapses to one clean column.
• Install as an app: Install app in Chrome or Edge, Add to Home Screen on a phone. Full-screen, on the home screen, offline-capable front desk.

• Lists use a numbered pager (“Showing 26–50 of 313”, Prev / Next, page numbers with gaps). Compact pagers inside drawers and card views show Prev / Next and “3 / 12”.
• The Audit log pages the same way since M4.14; the page, sort and filters sit in the address bar, so page 3 of a filtered trail can be bookmarked.
• Nothing scrolls infinitely, so the browser's Find (Ctrl F) always searches exactly what is on screen.