The Booking Factory — Summer 2018 App update

What is new the last few months in The Booking Factory

Last few months feels like it’s been dragging on forever as a product owner, no huge major changes or features but lots of minor updates. I will try cover them all below:

Integrations:

1. Hoperator — An amazing guest communication and CRM application which is suitable for all shapes and size properties. You can send emails and SMS via Hoperator and increase your guest satisfaction.
2. RoomChecking — A seriously sweet housekeeping application. If you are looking to get those housekeepers to tell you real time on room clean status this is the way. Suitable for all sizes.

We are working on a RM (Revenue Management) integration soon and will update you when this is ready.

App Updates:

1. Financial Report — Now see the summary of daily transactions including payments and tax summary
2. City Tax Movement — Now city taxes can be moved from one folio to another. This was important since sometimes you needed the agent to pay for the room but guest to pay for city tax.
3. Mandatory Extras Percentage — Now you can set breakfast or any extra to be a percentage of the room total instead of a fixed amount. This was needed for Greece where the Government rules meant breakfast must be a percentage of room rate for tax purposes.
4. Tax Edit — Now you can manually delete, update and add new taxes per night and per item in the folio. This is perfect to edit the folio for rare cases.
5. GDPR — Various changes to booking engine to show privacy policy and agree checkbox before booking. (More things to come for admin soon)
6. Open API for Bookings — Now developers can do lots of things and integrations. It’s not complete yet but we will add more as time goes by and we can accommodate any requests. Find API here: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/4290559/RW1ekHtT
7. Invoice Settings — You can now specify a unique address for the invoice, before we took your hotel address but for some properties this was not correct (Serviced apartments etc)
8. Tax Settings — We made it much easier to update the tax when the government changes the tax rate, you can enter in advance and we will take care of the rest.
9. Bug Fixes — 100s of bug fixes this month, as always we aim to fix bugs fast and if you find any please let me know. We don’t feel like bug fixes are worth documenting.

Updates that are near: (Next few weeks)

1. Currency — Soon we can have PMS currency and connect to channel manager and OTA in another currency. It will convert all bookings to hotel currency on new booking.
2. Housekeeping Status — Calendar will soon have clean status, this will help easier management of housekeeping. Also update to report for dirty but unused rooms
3. ICRTouch Epos — We are near to completing this integration, we will use dropbox to manage the text files between the cloud on on premise POS.

Founders Notes:

As you can see it’s been a lot of small things and small improvements. We are working on some big features but still months away currently. I can’t reveal what it is yet but it is worth waiting for!