Menu structure
The general menu structure in Nitesoft is like this:
Front Office Here are additional functions related to front office. Such as planning lists and Search.
Customers Here are the functions related to customer profiles.
Housekeeping Here are all functions realating to housekeeping.
Units & Rates Here you can view rooms and prices.
Reports -here are all reports.
On top of the menu you can find six icons:
Dashboard which will give you an instant overview on what goes on in the hotel.
Grid which is a shortcut to the calendar view.
New Reservation Links to the booking wizard.
Check in/out Links to Arrival list, Departure list and In-House list.
Alerts here you will see if you have any tasks due.
Help and Support - where you can search in articles or send a support request.
The menus in Nitesoft varies depending on your userrole and there can also be hotel specific settings on what different users can see.
Make a reservation
There are three ways a reservation can be created in Nitesoft: it can be made by guest in hotels booking engine, it can be created in an extrernal booking channel and be imported to Nitesoft through a channel manager (if you have a channel manager connected) and it can be created by user in Nitesoft intranet.
In intranet there are three ways to create a reservation:
By using the New Reservation booking flow
By using drag n'drop in the grid
The best way depends to create the reservation depends on the type of reservation you want to create.
Grid is usually the easiest way if you want to create a short reservation without any special codes.
New reservation is suitable if you want to use an agreement or promotion code when you book, if you want to create a booking with many rooms, if you want to search on a specific room criteria (e.g. a room with ocean view) or if the reservation is for a long period time.
Find a reservation
There are three types of search in Nitesoft:
Main search it will search for all future reservations and three months back in time. You can search for Guest name, Customer name, Company, Booking number, Phone number, External Booking number and Invoice number.
Reservation search it is a search from where you can search on all reservations.
Page search if you want to search on any word on a page. You open page search by clicking Ctrl+F5 if you use PC.
Status of reservations
Before arrival a reservation can be either Preliminary or Confirmed. You cannot make payments or create invoices for preliminary reservations and you cannot check-in preliminary reservations.
After check-in the reservation will get status Checked in and it will have this status until it is Checked out.
A room that is checked in cannot be cancelled.
If a room is not checked in on day of arrival it will automatically get status No-show at end of day.
If you cancel a reservation it will get status Cancelled, it cannot be switched back to Confirmed status after it has been cancelled.
Look at the instruction of Grid view to see explaination of the status colors.
Change a reservation
In edit mode of a reservation you can change any of the fields you filled in when you created it.
You can also add and edit comments and alerts in the reservation.
If you want to switch the price for a reservation you can either add a rate code, switch price directly for the room or use the Set rate function if you need to change rate for several rooms at the same time.
There are two functions to make changes of room, switch room and date and/or room change. Switch room function will only switch the room itself but keep dates and prices as before so if you need to prolong or shorten a reservation you should use date and/or room change instead. Moving rooms or prolonging/shortening stays can be done from grid aswell.
In the options menu you can find functions to Add a room, Merge or Split group reservations.
Manage reservation as a Block booking
Each reservation has two views adapted to manage larger reservations.
These are:
Block Grid: Which is used to efficiently add and remove rooms in the booking when you have many rooms.
Guest Management: Which is used to efficiently add and remove guests for the rooms when you have many rooms.
For large reservations it is also possible to import a Guest list, like this.
Payments and Invoices
You can initiate a payment either from click outstanding amounts in Arrival list or form Reservation view using Add payment.
In Arrival list there are 2 columns one if you want to pay for the entire reservation and one if you only want to pay for your room and extras added to that room. You can also split the payment in any way.
There are three possible types of payments:
Normal nitesoft payment this is basically a manually registered payment, for example if hotel uses an cashier system that is not connected to Nitesoft you will first make the payment in the cashier and the register the same amount in Nitesoft, or if you get a bank payment for an invoice you will have to register it in Nitesoft.
Cashier payment if you have a cashier connected you can start make for example a card payment directly through Nitesoft.
Payment link If you have a web payment provider connected you can create a payment link that you can send to customer, the link is then a pending payment and the customer will complete the payment himself and the payment will then be confirmed in Nitesoft.
You can create invoices and credit invoices.
When creating invoices you should check Sales Ledger report, here you can find all reservations that have an outstanding balance. When you register payments for invoices you should check Invoice report here you can find all unpaid invoices.
Housekeeping
Every room has a housekeeping status that is a combination of if the room is busy and if it is clean, these are occupied/check out/vacant and clean/dirty. The status is updated each night at end of day. Reservation is occupied when guest is staying and check out before the guest is checking out.
For example if a guest is staying 2 days:
Room is ready for check-in it now has status clean/vacant.
Guest checks in room becomes clean/occupied.
At end of day room becomes dirty/occupied (the room still have status occupied because guest will not check out today).
Room is freshed up and Housekeeping marks it as clean again, status is now clean/occupied.
At end of day room becomes dirty/check-out (status check-out because guest will check out).
Guest checks out status becomes dirty/vacant.
Housekeeping cleans room and it is back to clean/vacant.
The cleaning list is called Room status, here you can clean a room.
It is possible to add alerts to a room, these alerts will show up in Room status list on the day they are scheduled to.
If you need to block out a room from booking you can make it Out of order.
Check-in and Check-out
Check-in and Check-out is normally done from arrival and departure list, it is also possible to do it from grid or from the reservation. All checked in reservations can be found in the In-house/fire-list.
Read more about all three lists here.
Room allocation
When you make a reservation in Nitesoft there will be a specific room allocated for this reservation. There are situations were the system will automatically switch rooms of reservations, it depends on which setting hotel have selected to have but for example if someone tries to book a room category were you have availabilty but a single room is not available during that time the system will move around the other reservations to fit the new one. For customers that have self check-in the system may move a reservation to a clean room of the same category if the room the guest try to check in to is not ready yet. So if you have allocated a specific room for a guest and you don't want it to be switched you need to lock the room.
No-shows and Cancellations
If a reservation is not checked in at end of day it will become No-show. It can still be checked during the night even though it has no-show status. Later it is possible to use undo no-show function if the reservation was not checked in by mistake.
You can either cancel a room in a reservation or cancel an entire reservation. Reservations that have been cancelled cannot be turned back to Confirmed status. Depending on when the cancellation is made there can be a cancellation cost added to the reservation. The cancellation cost of a reservation can be added or removed.
Customer mangement
There are three types of profiles in Nitesoft: Individual, Company and Travel agent. Individual profiles can be contact persons for Company profiles. When you add customer or guest information in a reservation this information will be searchable but it will not automatically become a profile. So if someone has booked before you will be able to find this information if you search for customer in the reservation, but in order to be able to get statistics for a guest you need to create a profile for it.
For profiles you can also add additonal comments and information, and when you search for a customer in the reservation the profiles will always be listed first in the list. All profiles are marked with an icon in the list, unlike the customer information that is just stored from a reservation.
Profile can be created from profile pages or from Reservation view. If you already have existing bookings by this guest you may want to merge the old reservations to the profile.
Read more here:
Create Company profile from reservation
Create Individual profile from reservation
Guest Messages
It is possible to setup mail and sms templates in Nitesoft to communicate with guests. Some messages are sent automatically for example Confirmation and maybe a Departure mail. Others can be sent manually, you can find these in the Guest Message drop down in Reservation view. For example it can be that you want to resend a confirmation, send a cancellation confirmation or send a payment link to the guest.
Help and Support
In Help and support you can search in articles and send support request