Short-stay reservations

Take nightly bookings against furnished units — availability with overlap protection, a guest folio per stay, and a check-in to check-out lifecycle that keeps short-stay revenue in the same system as your leases.

Reservations → /reservations ^Beta

Reservations is the short-stay counterpart to a lease. It answers the same question a tenancy does — who is in this unit, and what do they owe? — for a stay measured in nights rather than months. The unit, the guest and the money stay in the same system as the rest of your portfolio.

availability checked → booking created with its folio → confirmed → checked in → checked out → completed, with charges posted to the folio at any point while it is open.

When to use it instead of a lease

Use a lease	Use a reservation
Monthly or annual tenancy	Nightly stay
Rent invoiced on a cycle	One folio settled at the end of the stay
Resident record, deposit held against the tenancy	Guest record, deposit held against the stay
Arrears, collections and statements apply	Payment posture tracked per stay

A unit can do both over time. What it cannot do is host a lease and a stay over the same dates — the two are separate records, and it is on you to keep long-let stock out of the booking calendar.

The screens

Reservations

The booking list, with quick-view chips for the cuts you need daily — arriving today, in house, departing. The chips combine and clear rather than replacing one another.

Availability

A per-unit timeline showing which units are occupied on which nights, so you can see a gap before you promise it. Status is shown as colour and text, never colour alone.

New reservation

The booking form, with a live folio preview beside it so the price you quote is the price the system will bill.

Reservation workspace

One stay: its details, the actions legal from its current state, and its folio.

Creating a booking

Pick the unit and the dates
Check-out must be after check-in. The stay is priced in nights, and a booking is always at least one night even if the dates are a few hours apart.
Record the guest
Name, email and phone. The guest is stored as a guest record on the stay — not as a resident, and not attached to a lease.
Choose the rate plan and channel
The channel records where the booking came from: direct, Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, VRBO, an agent, a corporate account, or other. Record it even when it is direct — it is the only way to answer later which channels are actually worth their commission.
Set the money
Nightly rate, cleaning fee, tax, discount and deposit. The folio preview updates as you type.
Save
The booking is created with its folio, in the status you selected.

How the preview is calculated

nights          = check-out − check-in, minimum 1
room charge     = nights × nightly rate
subtotal        = room charge + cleaning fee + tax − discount
balance         = subtotal − deposit

The preview and the folio the server writes are computed by the same arithmetic, in whole cents. What you quote a guest is what the system bills them — a preview that drifts from the invoice is a trust failure, not a rounding detail.

Double bookings are impossible, not merely discouraged

Overlapping stays on the same unit are rejected by the database itself, not by a warning in the form. Two people cannot hold the same unit on the same night, no matter which screen, import or integration the second booking arrives through.

The lifecycle

Ten states, and only the moves in this table are legal. The workspace offers exactly one obvious next action for the current state, so you are never shown a button that would be rejected.

From	Can move to
Inquiry — an enquiry, nothing held	Reserved, Cancelled
Reserved — held, not yet confirmed	Confirmed, Cancelled
Confirmed — booking is firm	Checked in, Cancelled, No-show
Checked in — guest has arrived	In house, Checked out
In house — mid-stay	Checked out
Checked out — guest has left	Completed, Refunded
Cancelled	Refunded
No-show — never arrived	Refunded
Completed	terminal
Refunded	terminal

Three rules are worth knowing before you start:

In house is optional. If you do not track mid-stay presence, go straight from checked in to checked out.
A guest on site is checked out, never cancelled. Cancellation is illegal once someone has arrived — otherwise a stay that consumed real nights could vanish out of your revenue.
Completed and refunded are final. There is no way back out of either. Corrections after settlement are made on the folio as reversals, not by moving the status backwards.

The folio

Every stay has one folio: the running account of what the guest owes. It accepts lines while it is open, and stops when it is closed or voided.

Line kind	Typical use
Room	Nightly accommodation
Cleaning	Turnover fee
Tax	Tax on the taxable base
Deposit	Held at booking
Discount	Reduction — recorded as a negative amount
Damage	Charged after inspection
Incidental	Minibar, laundry, late checkout
Commission	Channel commission on the stay
Adjustment	Anything that does not fit the above

Charges are positive; discounts and credits are negative. That way the folio total is always the sum of its lines, with no rules to remember about which column a number belongs in.

Payment posture

Separate from the stay's status, each reservation carries where it stands on money: unpaid, deposit received, partially paid, paid, overpaid or refunded. A stay can be checked out and still unpaid; the two fields answer different questions and neither implies the other.

Unit turnover

Each stay records the unit's turnover state — clean, dirty, in progress, inspected or out of service — so the next arrival is not sent to a room that has not been serviced.

What is not included yet

Stated plainly so you can plan around it rather than discover it mid-season:

Not available	What to do instead
Editing a booking	Cancel and rebook. The action is visible but disabled, with the reason on it.
Channel sync	Bookings from Airbnb and the OTAs are entered here; there is no two-way calendar sync. Channel is a field you record, not a live connection.
Channel commission reconciliation	Post commission as a folio line. It is not reconciled against a channel statement.
Owner payouts from stays	Short-stay revenue does not flow into owner statements or disbursements.
eTIMS on folios	Folios are not filed to eTIMS. Invoice separately where the tax treatment requires it.
Guest messaging	Confirmations and pre-arrival messages are sent outside the system.
Reservation reports	Read the list and the availability timeline; there is no dedicated reporting pack yet.

Rate plans and channels are read-only in the app — they are set up for you during onboarding. Ask support to add one rather than looking for a settings screen.

Common problems

Symptom	Cause and fix
The booking is rejected as overlapping	Another stay already holds that unit on one of those nights. Check the Availability tab — the constraint is enforced by the database and cannot be overridden from the form.
A unit you just created is not in the picker	Newly created units take a short while to become bookable. Wait and reload before raising it.
Cancel is not offered	The guest is already checked in or in house. Check them out instead — see the lifecycle.
The folio will not accept a line	The folio is closed or voided. Reopen the question with a reversal on the existing line rather than a new charge.
A charge is wrong after check-out	Reverse the line. Do not attempt to move the status backwards; completed and refunded are terminal.
Reservations is missing from the menu	The module has not been enabled for your organisation.
A stay is checked out but still shows unpaid	Status and payment posture are separate. Record the settlement on the folio.

Units — the stock a reservation books against
Portfolios — grouping short-stay units for reporting
Amenities and bookings — shared facilities, which are booked separately
Security deposits — how deposits work on the long-let side