Housekeeping

The observant users must have noticed a new icon on the top left of the calendar, in the web app.

It has been placed there in anticipation of a new piece of functionality that we make available today: housekeeping.

Housekeeping functionality is a common part of the PMS’s for bigger hotels.

In small lodges, housekeeping is not that hard to manage manually. Except from one thing: keeping track of when to perform the tasks.

Why is this so?

Because, in many places,  it is a common practice to clean a room, or change linen, not on a daily basis, but at varying intervals.

For instance, a certain B&B might have the policy to clean daily but change linen every two days.
This sounds simple, but planning activities spaced in such an uneven way can be difficult, especially when the length of a visitors stay is a number that cannot be divided by the policy interval.

For example, a guest stays for 5 days and the policy is to change linen every two days. According to policy, linen should be changed twice, but since the last change is before the departure of the guest, it has to be changed once more after checkout. So, would it make sense to skip the second change altogether?
There is no automated way to solve this. It is a judgement call. But there can be help. And here we step in.

The new housekeeping functionality produces a report for that shows the required work for the said day, and, also, the anticipated work for the coming 6 days. So, it is up to the owner to decide whether he will follow the proposed worklist, or strike out a work item because it is deemed unnecessary.
The report looks like this:

The date with the white background is the one the report is produced for. The other days are auxiliary.

To hand the report to the staff that performs the work, the extra days are not needed, so the report is printed clean and slim.

For greater flexibility, setting the cleaning and change-linen intervals, is at room type level.

Needless to say that this is just for starters. As with all other things, we will keep enhancing and developing housekeeping further, based on your input.

Housekeeping is part of the Plus, Pro and Premium subscription plans and it is available to all the existing subscribers of this plans as of today.