Lists and reasons
Eighteen short lists your staff pick from, and why free text was worse.
Lists & reasons holds the short lists staff pick from: cancellation reasons, discount reasons, comp reasons, void reasons, no-show reasons, paid-out reasons, refund reasons, rate-override reasons, room-move reasons, out-of-order reasons, departments, card types, bed types, lost-and-found and maintenance categories.
Why they are lists and not free text: "why did we comp fourteen rooms last month" has never been an answerable question in a system where the reason is typed, because nobody types the same words twice.
- Some entries can be marked manager only — an ordinary user is not offered them.
- Most lists belong to the whole group; a few are per hotel — out-of-order reasons, for one — and those are added against the hotel on screen.
- Nothing is deleted. Retiring an entry stops it being offered and leaves everything already recorded against it standing, so last year's reports do not change when this year's list does.
Add the entries your staff actually need. A list that does not contain the real reason trains people to pick the nearest wrong one, and then the reports lie confidently.
How you are paid, and where business comes from
The last two boxes on the screen are a different shape from the rest, and both used to be rows only Asar could insert.
- How you are paid is the buttons a cashier sees when taking money. Add your own — Paytm, Amex, a local wallet — and say whether it appears at the desk, in the restaurant, or both, and whether it needs a reference (a card approval code, a UPI reference). Until this existed, adding one was a change to the product and a deployment, which is why nobody was ever offered it twice.
- Where business comes from is the source picked on every booking, grouped by category — walk-in, telephone, website, OTA, travel agent, corporate. An OTA or an agent can carry a commission percentage, which is what makes the source reports worth reading.
Entries marked Asar ship with the product and cannot be renamed or retired: every report in the system groups by them, and a hotel redefining cash would make a tenders report mean two different things. Your own can be retired at any time, and everything already recorded against them stands.