First day: hotel, guesthouse

A hotel, a guesthouse, apartments and a hostel all run on the built-in PMS: floors instead of dining halls, rooms and beds instead of tables, a folio (the guest bill) instead of a one-off receipt. This is not a separate product but a profile of location settings: with the "hotel" business type the panel switches the wording and opens the right sections itself.

Where to open it: the "Rooms" section is the same section as "Floor plan" in a restaurant (admin.cenaly.ge/tables), renamed for hotels. It opens in the floor-plan editor; the working room board is switched on with the "🛏️ Rooms" button in the header, and the same button takes you back to the plan. Next to it are "Room types", "Rates", "🔌 PMS" and, for Russian locations, "🛂 Migration registration". There is no separate /hotel or /pms address in the panel — do not look for one.

What you need to get started#

• Any computer or tablet at the front desk. The room board, the reservation grid and check-in are ordinary admin-panel pages in a browser. No dedicated hotel terminal is needed.
• The guest's phone. A QR code in the room opens the menu, service requests and "My bill" in a browser — the guest installs nothing.
• A receipt printer — optional, through the bridge. Printing goes through Cenaly Hardware Bridge, a Windows or Linux service (Cenaly Hardware Bridge). ⚠️ Note: the guest's money is taken by the till — receipts are issued there, at payment. Check-out closes the bill only at a zero balance and does not issue a receipt itself — see Hotel bill, payment and receipt.
• Online booking payments — when you are ready. A prepayment, deposit or card guarantee for website bookings works only with a connected payment provider — Prepayment, card guarantee and hold. Until then, sell rate plans without prepayment: the guest pays at your desk.
• Internet. Required, but losing the connection does not stop the till — If the internet goes down.

The common frame of the first day#

Sign-up, the location, the business type, languages and the subscription are the same for every format — they are described in the hub First day: choose your business type. The hotel part starts here.

Checklist: a small hotel and a guesthouse#

The goal of day one is to check a guest in inside the system and see their bill.

1. Floors and rooms. The plan editor works like a floor plan (Floor plan), except halls are called floors and the elements are "Room" and "Bed" (for hostels and shared dorms). You do not have to add them one by one: the "+ Add rooms" button creates a range (for example 201–230, up to 500 rooms at a time) with an optional prefix, a live count of "N rooms · M floors" and a list of numbers that already exist and will be skipped. The onboarding wizard offers the same step when you choose the "hotel" type.
2. Room types. The "Room types" button: name (Standard, Deluxe…), base nightly rate and capacity. A type is assigned to a room in the properties panel on the plan, and its rate is pre-filled into the check-in form — on a particular stay you can override it.
3. The location's time zone — check it now. The accommodation charge is posted automatically after 03:00 local time for your location; if the time zone is wrong, the night "moves" to another part of the day. The time zone lives in the location settings.
4. Tourist tax, if it applies to you: a percentage of the rate with a minimum per night, or a fixed amount per night. It is posted to the folio as a separate line.
5. The first check-in. The form asks for the rate plan and the nightly price (pre-filled from the room type) and the guest card: phone, e-mail, ID document, citizenship, date of birth, notes. A departure date is not required at this step — a walk-in stay is open until check-out, and dates belong to the reservation. If the guest has stayed before, the system shows a "returning guest" banner. Checking in opens the folio.
6. What accumulates in the folio. Every night stayed (the arrival day is not charged twice), the tourist tax, orders placed from the room by QR, and manual operations on the till against the room bill: a charge, a service fee, a discount, a deposit, moving items between bills. The balance is visible on the room card and in the list of open bills on the till.
7. Check-out. It closes the folio with a single settlement and moves the room to "Needs cleaning"; a "Clean room N after departure" task appears on the shift task board. ⚠️ A room bill is closed by the front desk at check-out — the till has no close button for room bills.
8. Room statuses — six of them: vacant, occupied, needs cleaning, cleaning, inspected, out of order. Future arrivals are not reflected in the room status: they live as reservations and are visible on the grid, so a room booked for next week stays sellable today.
9. The reservation grid. A view switch on the same page — a 21-day calendar with bars for reservations and current stays per room. You can create a booking without opening it: pick the room on the floor plan — its properties carry the "Room bookings" block and a "📅 Book the room" button that opens the same date-based form. A regular room booking is a pair of dates, one night minimum; selling a room for a few hours is turned on separately — Sell a room for a few hours. Checking in by a booking happens in one window: the "Check in" button on the rooms board, in the reservations list and in the hall panel at the till opens the same check-in window. Early check-in and late check-out, once turned on in "Room types" → "Check-in and check-out", are ticked right in the booking form — see Check a guest in and out.
10. Roles. The front desk gets the receptionist job role, the cleaner the housekeeper role (whose workspace has no till): Staff and shifts; which rights open what — Front desk, housekeeping and accountant permissions. On a phone the housekeeper opens "My rooms" in the browser; in the Cenaly Team app for Android the same list comes as Housekeeping mode — their own cleanings in work order, each with a single "Take", "Start" or "Done" button. The Team build with this mode is not yet on the download page, and even in it the minibar, the room check and damage with photos stay in the web screen — see A housekeeper's shift.

What you need in terms of devices: one computer at the desk. What can honestly wait: rate plans and the price calendar, sales channels, reports, migration registration (if your guests are local only).

Both services support the PMS, nightly accommodation charges and inbound iCal calendars. Set the hotel's time zone and check calendar synchronization. Payment providers, live OTA connections and recently introduced screens have separate availability conditions.

Checklist: apartments and selling through channels#

The goal of day one is to make sure the same dates are not sold twice.

1. Rate plans. A manager next to the room-type directory: board (room only, breakfast, half board, all inclusive), derived rates ("breakfast = base +15%"), pricing by number of guests with child age buckets and an extra bed, day-of-week surcharges, sale restrictions (minimum and maximum nights, booking window, no arrival or departure on certain days), a cancellation policy (flexible, non-refundable, first-night penalty, percentage or fixed), sales channels (all / direct only / OTA only) and a corporate access code.
2. The price and stop-sale calendar. A price and a sale block for specific dates, bulk editing "rate × period", a preview of the final price. ⚠️ The calendar overrides a negotiated price entered at the front desk — that is intended; and for a rate plan with its own price, seasons do not apply at all (seasons are the fallback for those who do not use plans).
3. Seasonality — the simple level. If plans are not needed yet: periods with a separate price for a room type or for all rooms at once.
4. Selling a room type rather than a specific unit. Such reservations stay unassigned and hold a quota (how many rooms of that type are sold for a date), and the physical room is picked with the assign button — manually or automatically. The block of unassigned reservations sits right above the grid.
5. The booking engine on your website. The guest picks dates and a rate, sees the calculation with restriction checks (minimum nights, booking window, stop-sale; a single reservation is capped at 30 nights) and receives a confirmation code. A free room is secured right away, or the guest gets a refusal with a reason; there is no waiting for staff confirmation. The guest confirms the contact by a link, and if the rate requires a prepayment or guarantee, pays it in the same form. Details — Direct booking on the website.
6. OTA calendars — today's working path. iCal import: paste an export link from Booking.com, Airbnb or another service into the room settings — external reservations start blocking those dates for you, refreshed roughly every 15 minutes, and conflicting overlaps are collected into a "sort out manually" list. iCal export: every room has its own feed, and the link is added as a calendar on the channel's side.
7. ⚠️ The two-way channel manager (rates and availability pushed to channels, reservations coming back) is written and runs on the provider's test environment: a live connection needs a partner account, which we do not have yet. For real date blocking in channels use iCal import and export.
8. Letters to the guest. Once a day the hotel writes to those arriving tomorrow and those who departed yesterday; the language is the reservation's, otherwise the location's, otherwise English. These two emails work on their own; your own rules, texts and sending times — Guest messages. If the location has a Telegram bot connected, the guest also gets arrival reminders.
9. Manual reservations. A reservation has a source (front desk, phone, direct from the guest, website, OTA), cancellation with a reason and a "no-show" mark; on an overlap or a too-early arrival the panel warns you. Turning a reservation into a stay is a single action on the arrival date.

What you need in terms of devices: a computer; a phone to see the booking flow through a guest's eyes. What can honestly wait: the two-way channel manager (see above), corporate rate codes, reports.

Checklist: a hotel with a restaurant and room service#

The goal of day one is for a room order to land on the guest's bill by itself.

1. A QR code per room. The room card has a "Create QR and attach" button; in bulk it is "Create QR for all rooms without a code (N)" across the location. Print them one by one or as A4 sheets — Table QR codes and device codes.
2. A menu for the rooms. Categories, items, photos, languages — QR menu. The guest scans the code in the room and orders just like at a table.
3. "Charge to room". In an occupied room this payment method is available to the guest: the amount is added to the folio and paid at check-out together with the stay; before confirming, the guest sees a consent text with the exact amount and the room number. ⚠️ The rule is narrow and deliberate: only orders from the in-room QR code land on the folio — anything rung up on the till, in the kiosk or arriving from an aggregator will not.
4. An order from a vacant room is blocked by the server with the reason "room is not checked in", and the guest sees a warning before sending.
5. Guest service requests. Towels, cleaning, "do not disturb", a wake-up call with a chosen time, a technical problem, other. In a hotel this button takes the place of the staff call and is shown only when "staff call" is enabled in the location settings; a request cannot be placed from a vacant room. On the staff side there is a "Guest requests" block on the room card: a counter, a list with the type and the wake-up time, the "In progress" and "Done" actions, updates in real time.
6. "My bill" for the guest. An item in the guest menu: charges, payments and the balance of their folio. Before check-in it shows an empty state, after settlement a "Paid" mark.
7. Kitchen and restaurant till. A kitchen display by stations — KDS; the till and the shift — POS and Cash shift. For a hotel these sections are on from the start.
8. Reports. A reports tab on the room board for a period: occupancy, average daily rate (ADR), revenue per available room (RevPAR), total revenue and revenue from food and drinks separately, the number of orders and a day-by-day table broken down by currency.

What you need in terms of devices: a computer at the desk, a tablet or a monitor for the kitchen display, a printer through the bridge if you print tickets. What can honestly wait: the self-service kiosk, delivery and takeaway, aggregators.

The first week#

Day one gave you rooms, a room type, a test booking and one check-in. During the week, bring everything the front desk uses daily into working shape. The order follows the tasks; the details are in the linked articles.

If something does not go through, start with Hotel: why an action does not go through.

Moving future bookings from your previous system#

If you are switching from another hotel management system, you do not have to retype the dates already sold: export your future bookings to a file and upload it. Each row becomes an ordinary booking — with the allotment, rate restrictions and an availability update for the website and channels.

What to prepare#

Export your future bookings from the previous system to CSV or Excel. You need the columns booking number (from the previous system), check-in, check-out, guest and room or room type. Optional — phone, email, adults and children, rate plan, price per night, currency, source and comment. If you are not sure which columns are needed, press Download template in the import window.

Not transferred: payments and deposits, guest documents, past stays and guests who are already staying. Add payments and documents to the booking after the transfer if needed.

How to upload#

1. Open Rooms and press ⤓ Import bookings above the rooms board.
2. Press Choose file. Columns are matched automatically — check them and correct if needed. Set the date format of the file (for example, "day.month.year").
3. Press Next. The system checks every row: whether the room and rate plan exist, whether the dates are free (taking the rows above in the file into account), whether the check-in is in the future. Rows with errors are highlighted with the reasons next to them; you can download them as a file, fix them in the previous system and upload again.
4. If the price in the file does not match the rate price, choose By rate or File for the row — or for all such rows at once with the buttons above the table. Without a choice the row is not written. If there is no rate plan and no price in the file either, the row cannot be transferred: the base price is not filled in automatically.
5. Press Write N bookings. Do not close the window while writing. If the connection drops, press Continue — bookings already written are not duplicated.

Uploading again and undoing#

You can upload the same file again: bookings already transferred are skipped. The same booking in another file (by the previous system's booking number) is not created a second time either.

If the transfer went wrong, press Cancel bookings created by this import at the last step. Only the bookings of this upload are cancelled, without a penalty. Bookings that staff have already changed, checked in or taken payment for stay as they are — the result shows how many were kept. A cancelled booking cannot be transferred again with the same file: create it manually.

The location's latest imports (up to five) are shown in the import window on any computer or phone: when they ran and how many bookings were created, skipped or failed. The file name is shown only on the device it was uploaded from. «Open result» shows the upload result — you can undo what it created from there.

What can wait#

• External PMS mode (the "🔌 PMS" button). The switching contour exists, but the adapter list currently contains only the demonstration "Mock (demo)" one — it is there to verify the path itself. Live connectors are in development; switching a working hotel over is premature.
• The two-way channel manager — awaits the provider's partner account and runs on the test environment. Use iCal.
• Migration registration (Russia). The "🛂" button on the room board: a record is created automatically at check-in, deadlines and statuses are visible, notification forms are printed and a CSV is exported. It is important to understand: this is a register and printable forms, not electronic filing — filing stays with you. It is enabled by the location country "Russia".
• Food service at the hotel — Restaurant, minibar and meals on the room bill. Meal-plan subscriptions belong to food-service business types; they are not a default hotel feature.
• Financial reports — Finance. Sales, purchases, cash shifts and demand analytics are supported on both the international and Russian services. Start using them after recording your first transactions; an empty period and a data-loading error are different situations.
• Your own website and domain — Website builder (hotels have their own templates in the gallery), Custom domain.
• Your own PBX and calls — Telephony.
• Restaurant inventory and food cost — Inventory, once the menu has settled.

Troubleshooting#

I cannot find a "PMS" or "Hotel" section. There is no such address. Everything lives in the "Rooms" section (admin.cenaly.ge/tables): the floor plan opens right away, the working board is behind the "🛏️ Rooms" button, external PMS behind the "🔌 PMS" button. If the section is called "Floor plan", the location does not have the "hotel" business type selected.

A night was not charged. Check the hotel's time zone, stay dates, room rate and guest folio. The nightly process runs after 03:00 local hotel time on both services. A delayed or failed charge needs investigation; changing the brand is not a remedy.

A guest cannot order from the room. Most likely the room is not checked in: the server cancels such orders with the reason "room is not checked in". Check that the stay is open and that the QR code is attached to that exact room.

An order did not land on the room bill. Only orders made from the in-room QR code go to the folio. Anything rung up on the till, in the kiosk or arriving from an aggregator does not — that is a deliberate rule.

The room bill will not close on the till. That is intended: a room bill is closed by the front desk at check-out, and the till has no close button for it.

Dates are not blocked on Booking.com or Airbnb. Verify both calendar links and the latest synchronization. iCal import and export work on both services and exchange occupied dates, not rates. Live channel-manager connections require separate activation; the test environment does not distribute your inventory to real channels.

A guest received the same email twice. Check the reservation and delivery history. Failed delivery is retried; a failure after the email service accepted the message can produce a duplicate.

FAQ#

Do I need to buy hotel equipment?#

No. The front desk works in a browser, the guest uses their own phone with a QR code. A printer and a fiscal printer come later through the bridge and only if you need them.

Do I have to add rooms one by one?#

No. The "+ Add rooms" button creates a range of up to 500 rooms at a time with a prefix and a live count; existing numbers are skipped rather than duplicated.

Is a departure date required at check-in?#

No. A walk-in stay is open until check-out; arrival and departure dates belong to a reservation, and an early departure automatically shortens the reservation to the actual stay.

Is a fiscal receipt issued at check-out?#

No. Check-out closes the bill only at a zero balance and moves the room to cleaning. The guest's money is taken by the till, which issues the receipts — Hotel bill, payment and receipt.

Can I sell a "room type" without choosing a specific room?#

Yes. Such a reservation stays unassigned and holds a quota for that type on the date, and the room is picked at check-in — manually or automatically. Details — Rooms, room types and inventory readiness.

What parts of the hotel contour do not work on the Russian brand?#

The PMS, room reservations, guest cards, nightly charges, iCal exchange and financial dashboards support both services. Check payment-provider and external-channel availability separately.

Related articles#

• First day: choose your business type — the common frame and the other formats
• Hotel: map of everyday tasks — all hotel articles by task
• Rooms, room types and inventory readiness — rooms, types, out of order
• Check a guest in and out — the front desk's daily work
• Hotel booking actions — create, change and cancel a booking
• Floor plan — the editor for floors and rooms, QR attachment
• Table reservations — the same booking mechanism applied to tables
• QR menu — the menu for room service
• POS — the room bill on the till and extra orders
• Staff and shifts — front desk, housekeeping, cleaning tasks