The property management system your desk, housekeepers and kitchen all work from
Hotel OS holds a property in one record: arrivals, room status, restaurant and bar orders, folios, the night audit and the owner's numbers. A property management system, or PMS, is the system of record for who is in which room and what they owe. This is ours, built in Harare for properties that trade in several currencies and lose power without warning.
The day is the unit of work, not the month
Open Hotel OS in the morning and you get the day, not a menu: who is arriving and when, who is departing and whether they have settled, which rooms are clean and inspected, which are blocked for maintenance. A duty manager should be able to take a shift by reading one screen, and everything else in the product exists to keep that screen honest.
What it replaces, and what it deliberately leaves alone
Hotel OS replaces the reservations diary, the housekeeping clipboard, the chit book behind the bar and the spreadsheet your invoices are typed into. It does not replace your accountant, your bank or your judgement about a guest. It posts to your accounting package rather than pretending to be one, and every posting traces back to the person, table or room behind it.
The night audit stops being an hour of arithmetic
At close of business the system rolls the business date itself: room and levy charges post to open folios, no-shows are priced against your cancellation terms, cashier drawers close by currency, and a manager's report shows occupancy, revenue by department, outstanding balances and anything that did not reconcile. A night manager checks and signs it rather than adding up till rolls.
What actually sits on the property
Hotel OS runs on a small server on site, with the desk, restaurant and back office on ordinary browsers and housekeeping on the handsets staff already carry. Usable cameras, network and tills stay. The bill of materials is agreed at the site assessment and is usually modest: the aim is a system that survives a load-shedding evening.
Sized for one boutique property, not a chain head office
Most software in this category is written for groups with a revenue manager and a systems administrator, then sold down to properties with neither. Hotel OS is built the other way round: for a duty manager, a housekeeping supervisor and an owner checking a phone.
Highlands House
Highlands House is a boutique guest lodge in Harare — thirty-six en-suite rooms, gardens, a pool and a garden restaurant — and the Hotel OS build there is in progress now. The restaurant serves residents and outside diners, the grounds need access control, and the owner wants one view of the property rather than three sets of figures.
What it covers
Arrivals and departures board
Today's movements in arrival order, with deposits, requests, repeat-guest history and balance owing visible before the guest reaches the desk.
Charge to room, settled once
Restaurant, bar, laundry and conferencing post straight to the folio from the table or till. Check-out prints one statement, split between company and guest if that was agreed at check-in.
Housekeeping board on a handset
Allocations, room status, linen and minibar usage and maintenance faults are entered by the housekeeper on their own phone, and the desk sees it change.
Stores and receiving
Deliveries, issues to kitchen and bar and stock counts sit on the same ledger as sales, so a variance is a report to work through rather than an argument at month end.
Roles, limits and approvals
Who may discount, void a bill, comp a meal or write off a debtor is set by role, with a limit and a record. Above the limit, it waits for a named approver.
Keeps trading when the line drops
Check-ins, restaurant orders and housekeeping updates continue on the equipment in the building during a power or internet interruption, then reconcile when service returns.
How it works
Site assessment, week zero
We spend a day on the property with the people who run it: reception, housekeeping store, kitchen, bar, gate and back office. We document room inventory, rate plans, the existing till and diary, network, cameras and power, then name the bottleneck worth fixing first.
Integration, weeks one to three
Rooms, rate cards, forward bookings, guest history, the menu and your chart of accounts are loaded, and the existing till, accounting package and gate hardware connected. The system runs alongside your current method and observes before it posts anything.
Rules and guardrails, week four
Discount limits, cancellation and no-show terms, charge-to-room authorisation, corporate credit terms and escalation to a duty manager are configured, then tested against your own historical bookings, so you see how the rules behave on trade you recognise.
Go live and optimise, week five onward
The property switches over with each department trained on its own screen, and we review weekly while it settles. A first system typically takes four to six weeks, and tuning continues as your season changes.
Questions buyers ask
What happens to bookings we have already taken for next year?
They are migrated. Forward reservations, deposits held, group blocks and agent allocations are loaded during integration and checked against your diary before go-live, which is why the system runs in parallel rather than switching over on a Friday night.
Our staff are not office workers. Will they use it?
Screens are built per role, so a housekeeper sees rooms and tasks and nothing else, on the phone already in their pocket. Training happens on the property during go-live week, in the language the team works in.
How is it priced?
By scope, after the site assessment: the departments you switch on, the integrations required and any hardware needed on site. We do not quote before walking the property, because a small lodge with one restaurant and a working till is different work from a property with conferencing and no network.
Can it run more than one property?
Yes. Each property keeps its own inventory, rates and staff, with consolidated occupancy and revenue reporting for an owner or group. We would still go live on one property and add the second once the first runs without our help.
What if the desk computer or a tablet fails mid-service?
Nothing is stored only on the device. Any other browser on the property signs in and carries on from the same record, and the restaurant can take orders on a phone while a till is replaced.
Does the system make decisions about guests on its own?
Only routine, verifiable ones: posting a charge, marking a room clean, releasing an unpaid hold at the cut-off you set, flagging a variance. Judgement calls — a refund, a dispute, an overbooking — escalate to a named person with the record attached.
Book a platform briefing
Fifteen minutes with an engineer who will ask how your property actually trades: how bookings arrive, how rooms are handed over, how the restaurant bills, how the night audit gets done today. Email sales@eigenstatesystems.com or WhatsApp +263 77 636 6999.