Menu structure
The general menu structure in Nitesoft is like this:
Icons Links to Dashboard, Grid, New Reservation, Check in/Check out, Alerts, Help & Support.
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 manage rooms, prices and availabilty. Read more about setup of rooms here, read more about prices and availabilty here.
Reports here are all reports, key figures and economy reports.
Administration Here is all configuration of the system made, there are also some logs. See for example 'Inital setup' here.
Agreement & Offers Here you build extras and different types of offer codes.
Booking engine Here is the management of the booking engine done.
Rates and Offers
Read more about how to work with Rates here.
Read more about how to work with Offers and Agreements here.
Availabilty and Allotments
It is possible to restrict the number of rooms you have availble on your website or in other external channels.
It can be controlled by the Advanced functions in BAR Management. Most used functions are: Availabilty (set limits of number of available units), Restrictions (close outs), Stay length (min and max length of stay).
If you have a channel manager integrated with connections to several booking channels there is always a risk that overbookings occur. This can happen if two guests book very close in time in two different channels. Read more here about what you can do to avoid this from happening.
Sometime you want to hold a set of rooms for a certain event, then you can create an Allotment. With an allotment a number of rooms you specify can only be booked if you use a specific allotment code. This can be useful if you have an agreement and have promised to always have a certain number of rooms available, or if you have a conference or wedding on some days and the guests should make the reservations themselves.
Extras, Services and Inventory Services
There are three different types of items that can be added to a reservation, extras, services and inventory services.
Extras are used for adding products, that have a specific price, for example breakfast or bath robe.
The extras can have diffrent types which they can be filtered on in planning lists, for example to filter out a 'Kitchen'-list or 'Housekeeping'-list. Extras can also have an inventory, which limits the max number of items that can be added on one day, for example if hotel only have 2 baby cribs, inventory is set to 2 and it is not possible to sell more than 2 baby cribs on the same day. Extras can be sold online read more here.
Services are used for costs that change every time, for example comission, deposit or laundry.
Inventory Services is a unit that can be booked in the calendar, unlike a normal room unit the inventory service does not have any guests and it is not linked to the cleaning schedule. Inventory Service can for example be used for booking Parkings or Sauna or similar.
Customer Management
All customer data and guest data is saved in Nitesoft as part of the reservation data, but to get additonal customer functions and better statistics you should create a Customer profile. When you search in customer data when creating a new reservation the profiles will always show up first in the search result and be marked by a profile icon.
There are three types of customer profiles in Nitesoft: Company, Individual and Travel Agency.
Company profiles can have one or many contacts or invoice contacts, these contacts are also Individual profiles. Company can have Subsidaries or Holding companies that link to other Company profiles. Add a Company profile like this and add contacts like this. You can also create a Company profile directly from a reservation like this.
Individual profiles can either be independent individual profiles or contact person of a company profile. Individual profiles are added directly in Customer pages like this or from a reservation like this. For individuals it is possible to build loyalty categories, that can be either applied manually to the profile or that be set automatically by a trigger. For example an individual becomes prioritized guest if they booked more than 10 nights.
Travel agencies works in similar way as Comapny profile, a reservation can be linked both to a Travel Agency and a Company.
If you have created a new profile and you want to if there are already existing reservations that should be linked to this profile you can use the Merge function.
If you want to get warned when certain guests book or prevent them from booking you can use the Black list function.
Guest Messages
To communicate with guests you can use mails or sms (both has to be configured to work, this is usually done during inital setup of Nitesoft). You build a set of message templates that can either be sent manually from a reservation or that is sent automatically according to a rule.
Automatic messages can for example be: "send confirmation mail when reservation is made online", "send arrival sms 2 days before arrival" or "send departure mail one day after departure".
Manual messages can for example be: "cancellation confirmation", "send invoice to customer" or "send payment link to customer.
Read how to add a Guest Message template here.
If you want to mail a specific set of reservation contact you can use the Bulk send function. This function allow you to search for reservations matching the criteria you choose and then send a mail or sms to all those reservations.
Reports
Read more about the reports in Nitesoft here.
Users
Users that have 'Management' user role can add and edit Nitesoft users.
See instruction here.