Property Management System
The day-to-day core of Prostay: the dashboard, calendar, reservations, guests, housekeeping, rates and reports.
68 articles
Dashboard
The daily overview screen and the cards it is built from.
Calendar
Reading the calendar, moving reservations and colour meanings.
- Blocked dates, holds, and rooms out of serviceFour things you can put on the calendar that are not a booking: blocked dates, a courtesy hold, out of service and out of order. Three of them look identical on the grid. Choosing the right one matters more than it appears to.
- Reading and using the calendarThe calendar is one row per room and one column per night. Here is what the colours and markers on a booking mean, how to move around a year of dates, and what happens when you drag a booking somewhere else.
- Unallocated bookings and the waitlistTwo counters sit at the top of the calendar. One is money you have already taken for rooms nobody has picked yet; the other is people who wanted a room you could not sell them. They look alike and they are opposites.
Reservations
Creating, editing, checking in and checking out, plus the folio and every reservation tab.
- Cash drawers: opening, counting and closing a tillThe float at the front desk, from the moment a shift counts it in to the moment somebody signs off the variance. Every movement is attributed, and the arithmetic is meant to be checked by hand.
- Checking guests in and outThe two presses that bracket a stay: when each button appears, what Prostay checks before it lets you through, how to let a guest leave early, and how to undo a check-in you made on the wrong booking.
- Creating a reservationTaking a booking by hand, from the type picker to the confirmation. Five steps, one running total on the right, and a handful of fields that decide what the booking costs and whether the room comes out of inventory.
- Credit cards on a reservationKeeping a card on file against a booking: what the list shows and deliberately does not, what the Active and Default flags actually change, and why looking at a full card number costs you a password every time.
- Diary notes, attachments and the activity logThe three tabs that hold everything a reservation knows about itself but cannot charge for: what staff wrote down, what is filed against the booking, and who changed what. Includes voiding an invoice and reversing a transfer posting.
- Guests on a reservationWho is actually staying, as opposed to who booked. Adding guests, picking one out of your guest database instead of typing them again, which fields the form insists on, and where passports and ID documents go.
- House accounts: billing people who are not stayingA dive school, a wedding party, a film crew and a Saturday bar tab all want to run up charges without a room. A house account holds those charges without booking a room to put them on.
- Importing reservations from a fileBringing existing bookings in from another system as a CSV. What the columns mean, why the shipped template cannot describe a two-room booking, and what to do when the server refuses a row.
- Posting charges and payments to a house accountThe account page is a bill you can read top to bottom: what they have spent, what they have paid, and every line behind both. Here is how charges go on, how money comes off, and what closing one actually does.
- Posting charges, payments and refundsEverything that puts a line on a folio, and everything that takes one off. Payments, credits, refunds, catalogue items, taxes, room revenue, adjustments, voids and moves, what each one is for and which fields it will not let you leave blank.
- Reading the folioThe folio is the guest's bill: every charge, every payment, in the order they happened. This is how to read one, how to tell a charge from a payment, and what to do when the total at the bottom is not the number you expected.
- Rooms on a reservationOne row per room, and two dropdowns you can change without leaving the page: which physical room the guest is in, and whose name it is under. What each column means, which rooms the assignment list will offer you, and why some bookings will not let you restructure them.
- Splitting a stay and moving roomsOne booking, more than one room. Moving a guest part-way through a stay without cancelling anything: how to build the itinerary, what each part costs, what happens to the folio and the calendar, and how to undo the whole thing.
- The reservation listEvery booking your property has ever taken, in one table. This is where you go when you know something about a guest and need to find their reservation, and where you go when somebody asks how many bookings came from Booking.com last month.
- The reservation pageOne booking, in full. The summary rail tells you what was booked and what is owed; the eight tabs beside it hold the rooms, the guests, the money, the cards, the notes, the paperwork and the history.
- The waiting listPeople who wanted a room on a night you were full, kept somewhere you will actually look. Prostay rechecks availability for each of them every time you open the page, so the list tells you who you can call back today.
Guests
Guest profiles, registration cards, confirmation letters and custom fields.
- Confirmation lettersThe letter a guest gets when their booking is confirmed, and the drag-and-drop builder that makes it. Templates, sections and columns, the field catalogue, your own wording, and which template goes to a guest and which to an agent.
- Finding a guestThe guest directory holds everyone who has ever stayed, not just the people in-house today. What each filter narrows down, why a search can return nothing when you know the guest exists, and how to get from a name to their stay history.
- Registration cardsThe form a guest signs at check-in. It uses the same builder as the confirmation letter, so this covers only what differs: preferences that apply to every card at once, the default template, and a smaller field catalogue.
- The guest profileEverything Prostay remembers about one person: contact details, stay history, spend, notes your team has left, and identity documents. What each field feeds, what the four tiles are counting, and what saves the moment you touch it.
Housekeeping
Room status, attendants, task sheets, maintenance and Lost & Found.
- Attendants, task sheets and the forecastTurning a house full of dirty rooms into a fair day of work for the people cleaning them: setting up attendants, generating and balancing task sheets, what a credit is, and how many staff tomorrow needs.
- Discrepancies, guest service and the night rolloverThe three things that happen to room status without anybody choosing them: the guest hangs a do-not-disturb sign, housekeeping finds a room in a state the front desk did not expect, and the night audit resets the whole house.
- Maintenance, service requests and Lost & FoundThe three registers that sit beside the housekeeping board: work orders for things that are broken, service requests for things a guest has asked for, and Lost & Found for things left behind.
- Room status against reservation statusTwo statuses sit on every room and they answer different questions. One says whether the room is clean, the other says whether somebody is staying in it. Knowing which is which is the difference between a smooth arrival and a guest standing in reception.
- The housekeeping boardEvery room in the property on one screen, with the state it is in and the person cleaning it. What the six tiles count, why three different status columns sit side by side, and how to turn over a floor without touching each room individually.
Rates & availability
Base rates, rate plans, packages and the availability matrix.
- Creating and editing base rate intervalsAdding a dated price to an accommodation type: the five required fields, seven prices for seven days, arrival and departure closures, what extra guests cost, and how to copy a whole season to another room type.
- How base rates and seasons workThe base rate is the price a room type sells at before any rate plan touches it, and it is held as dated intervals. A season here is an interval you have named, not a separate setting.
- Multi-currency base pricingQuoting a room in a currency other than your own means typing a price in that currency, not converting one. Where the currency list comes from, what the exchange rates are really for, and what an empty foreign grid does to a booking.
- Pricing intervals on rate plansA rate plan holds no prices of its own. Its intervals do: which accommodation types they price, which dates and stay lengths they answer for, what each day of the week costs, and what an extra guest adds.
- Rate plans and packagesA rate plan is a named offer sold alongside your base rate. What the two names are for, which sources can sell it, whether guests see it in the booking engine, and how to read the list without opening every row.
- The availability matrixOne row per accommodation type, one column per night. This is where you hold units back, set a minimum stay, close arrivals or block a night, one night at a time.
- The occupancy gridA read-only fortnight of remaining availability, one row per accommodation type and eight property totals underneath. It is the fastest way to find the nights that are full, and the nights you have oversold.
Booking sources
Where your bookings come from, and how to track each source.
- Adding and editing a booking sourceEvery field in the Add Booking Source panel, which of them reach the list and the reports, and how to change a source afterwards on its own page. Two fields are required and the rest are notes to yourselves.
- Reading the booking sources listEvery place a booking can arrive from, in one table. What the nine columns hold, what the Key Account badge is worth, why one row has no menu, and what the four filters actually narrow down.
- Source types and their commissionsA source type is a category with a commission rate attached, and it is the only place that rate is set. How to add one, what the Active switch does and does not do, and why changing a commission changes every source that uses it.
- The source profile and its productionWhat one booking source is worth to you, in four figures and six tabs. Reading the production history, keeping notes and contracts on the source, and what the activity log and the agent access tab are for.
Reports
Every report in Prostay, what question it answers and how to read it.
- Finance reports: balances, charges and refundsSeven flat tables that answer one question between them: who owes you money, what they were charged, what they paid and what got reversed. Which report to open, and how they reconcile.
- Finding a report and using its filtersThirty reports sit behind one search box, and almost all of them are driven by the same filter panel and the same two toolbar buttons. Learn that panel once and every report in this section opens the same way.
- Occupancy, ADR and RevPARThe three numbers a hotel is judged on, and the three reports that trend them. How they relate, which one to move, and why RevPAR is the one that cannot be gamed.
- Reading the Performance CenterEight cards covering occupancy, rate, sales and channels, each on its own period. What the tiles compare against, how the cards tie together, and where the arithmetic can be checked.
- Report groups and who can see reportsReport groups name a set of people, not a set of reports. What the screen actually stores, where report access is really decided, and what the switch and the delete do.
- Reservations by rate plan, country and booking dateThree reports that count bookings rather than value them. Which rates sell, which markets send them, and what each day of booking brought in.
- Revenue by items, services and categoriesThree reports read the same folio postings: one row per item, the same rows grouped by category, and those categories against last year. What each column counts and which totals have to match.
- Room moves and rate overridesThe management view over every stay that changed room and every price that was changed by hand: who did it, why, and which discounts are still waiting for a manager.
- Room revenue by source, type and planThree reports cut the same room revenue three ways, and a fourth counts the bookings behind it. What each cut is good for, how to read a row, and why the Date Frame control changes the answer more than the dates do.
- Rooms out of order and out of serviceThe two reports that account for rooms you could not sell: what each one covers, why a repair on the list is not always a room off sale today, and how the counts tie back to the room summary.
- The daily reservation reportsArrivals, Departures, In House, Cancellations and No-Show are one report with five date questions. Learn which one answers which question, and what the columns they do not share are telling you.
- The Daily Revenue Report and its drill-downsOne date, five sections and six reports behind them. What each figure counts, which of them are room nights rather than money, and why the drill-downs open on a different range than the summary.
- The house account postings reportOne list of every charge and payment across every house account, and a panel telling you how old the money you are owed is. The two questions anyone asks about non-resident billing.
- The House Status reportOne page that answers what the house is doing tonight: who is staying, who is arriving, how many rooms are sellable, what the night is worth and what condition the rooms are in.
- The housekeeping productivity reportPer-attendant output over a date range, read straight off the task sheets: what each of the nine columns is actually counting, why credits and rooms disagree about who worked hardest, and what the numbers cannot tell you.
- Turnaways: recording the business you could not takeEvery hotel counts the bookings it wins. A turnaway is the note you keep about one you lost, and a few months of them tell you whether you are losing people on price, on availability, or on something you could fix this week.
PMS settings
Taxes, policies, folio configuration, accommodation types and add-ons.
- Accommodation types, rooms and amenitiesAccommodation types are what you sell and rooms are what you hand a key to. Setting up both, mapping them to floors, and why there are two separate amenity lists that never meet.
- Folio configuration and invoicingHow charges are split across folios per booking source, and how invoices get their number, their layout, their timing and the deposit a guest is asked for.
- General system settingsLanguage, dates, times and currency, the multi-currency configuration that cannot be undone, and the automation preferences that decide what the system does without being asked.
- Items, services and add-onsThe catalogue of everything you sell that is not a room: items and their categories, packages built out of other items, and the add-ons upsold during booking.
- Payment optionsWhich cards you accept, where each one is allowed, and how bank transfer and your own invented payment types find their way into the list a cashier sees.
- PoliciesCancellation charges, cancellation reasons, terms and conditions, check-in and check-out times, and the status a new direct booking starts life with.
- Property details, address and photosThe screen that holds what your property is called, where it is and what it looks like. Most of these fields are read by guests rather than by staff, which is what makes them worth getting right.
- Reservation settings and billing featuresTwo pages of master switches. One decides which restructuring and pricing actions the desk is offered, the other decides which billing tools exist at all.
- Reservation types and custom fieldsReservation types decide whether a booking takes a room out of inventory and what the desk must collect before it can save. Custom fields add your own questions to the booking form.
- Taxes and feesThe six ways Prostay can calculate a charge, the difference between exclusive and inclusive, and why the Active switch is the only thing standing between a tax and every quote you produce.
- Users, roles and permissionsPeople get a role, roles get permissions, and a permission is what decides whether a button exists. How to build a role that grants exactly what a job needs, and how to find the one permission you are actually looking for.
- Where the settings liveProstay keeps its settings in two separate places with confusingly similar names. Which tree holds what, why the split is where it is, and the four names that catch people out.