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.com/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.

The hotel vertical is a working core with open tails: the PMS, rates, folios, the booking engine and calendar exchange with OTAs are in production, while a live two-way channel manager and connectors to external PMS systems are not. That is flagged honestly below.

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: check-out does not issue a fiscal receipt — it closes the folio with a settlement; a receipt, if required, is rung up separately on the till.
• Online card payments — not for day one. At the direct booking step on the website no prepayment is collected; payment happens at your end. Card payments become relevant later, for storefront orders — Payments.
• 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.
10. Roles. The front desk gets the receptionist job role, the cleaner the housekeeper role (whose workspace has no till): Staff and shifts.

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).

⚠️ On the Russian brand (cenaly.ru) there is no automatic nightly accommodation charge and no inbound OTA calendar import — those two runs live on the AWS contour only. The PMS itself (check-in, reservations, rooms, guests, migration registration) works on both contours.

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. The server answers synchronously: it either confirms the reservation and locks a free room, or refuses honestly with a reason. There is no waiting for staff confirmation, and no prepayment is collected.
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. Nothing to configure, and no duplicates. 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.

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".
• Meal subscriptions for long stays — Meal plans: the section is switched on separately and works on the international contour only.
• Financial dashboards — Finance. ⚠️ AWS contour; on cenaly.ru the section is unavailable.
• 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.com/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 two things: the location's time zone (the charge is posted after 03:00 local time) and the brand — on cenaly.ru there is no automatic nightly charge.

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. Today's working path is calendar exchange: export the room feed into the channel and import the channel's link to us (refreshed roughly every 15 minutes). The two-way channel manager awaits a partner account, and on cenaly.ru inbound calendar import does not exist at all.

A guest received two arrival letters. By design that does not happen: one guest gets one letter per reservation. Check whether there are two reservations for the same guest.

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 folio with a settlement and moves the room to cleaning; fiscalization is not built into that path — a receipt, if required, is rung up on the till.

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.

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

The PMS, reservations, rooms, guest cards and migration registration work. What does not work on cenaly.ru: the automatic nightly accommodation charge, inbound OTA calendar import, meal subscriptions and financial dashboards.

Related articles#

• First day: choose your business type — the common frame and the other formats
• Hotel: rooms, PMS and guest service — the full guide to the vertical
• 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