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The front desk

Checking a guest in

Room, identity, and the folio opens. What stops a check-in and what to do about it.

Open the booking and choose Check in, or use today's arrivals list.

What it needs:

A room. A booking made on a room type alone has none yet. Assign one, and only rooms of the right type that are free for the whole stay are offered.
The guest's identity. Name, phone and address, and an ID — see Aadhaar, PAN, passport and Form C. A foreign national needs the passport and visa details, and Form C follows from them.
Anybody else in the room. Additional guests belong on the booking, not in somebody's memory, and the police register is built from them.

What refuses it:

The room is vacant-dirty. Housekeeping has not released it. The screen offers an override to whoever has the authority, and using it tells housekeeping.
"No room assigned" — assign one first.
"Cannot check in ..." with a date — the arrival is not today by the hotel's operating date. Check the operating date before assuming the booking is wrong; an unrun night audit looks exactly like this.

When it succeeds: the room becomes occupied, the folio opens, and the stay begins charging room and tax nightly at the audit.

More in The front desk

Aadhaar, PAN, passport and Form CWhat identity the law wants, what the system checks, and where Form C is filed. The folioOne guest, one stay, every charge and payment on it — and what its balance means. Posting a chargePost a charge on the folio, choose what it is for, and it lands with your name on it. Taking a paymentTake a payment on the folio: method, amount, reference. It is the reference that saves you later. Splitting a payment across methodsOne settlement, several methods, checked against the folio as one movement. Advances and depositsMoney taken before the charges exist, held against the stay and applied when they do. Voiding a posting, writing off a balanceNothing is deleted. A mistake is reversed with a reason, and both lines stay visible. Checking out, and the tax invoiceSettle the folio, print the invoice, and the room goes dirty for housekeeping. Splitting a stay across several invoicesRoom, food and spa on one bill or three — the guest decides, and you tick the lines. Proforma invoice — a bill before the stayWhat a company needs to raise a purchase order. Not a tax invoice, and it says so. Billing a company: the city ledgerA folio routed to a company instead of collected, and the ageing that follows it. Money owed and open balancesThe list that stops a hotel losing money quietly, and the red dot that counts it.