Connect your hotel property system

If your venue has rooms as well as a bar, you can link the property system the hotel runs on. Once it's connected, staff can put part of a bar bill on a guest's room instead of losing that trade.

This page only sets up the link. Taking a room charge — and taking one back off — happens on the till: see Put a bill on a guest's room.

Before you start

You need three things from your property system supplier:

• the address — the web link they give you for connecting other systems. It has to start with https. If yours starts with http, ask them for the secure one: without it, your password would travel unprotected every time.
• a username
• a password

You can set this up, and so can anyone you have given a login whose level includes Connect and set up integrations — a Manager has it. Someone whose level includes only See integrations can open these pages and sees the settings and the hotel map without being able to change them; where a button would be, they see a line telling them to ask you. (Levels are set on Giving someone else a login.)

Connect it

1. Go to Marketplace → Discover and open the Rezcontrol card. Until you're connected it opens on Setup; once you are, it opens on Room charges, and Setup is the last of the tabs along the top.
2. Fill in the address, username and password.
3. Select Save and test.

We check the details with your property system before saving anything. If they don't work, nothing is stored — so a typo leaves you exactly where you started, with nothing half-set-up behind the scenes.

Your password is stored scrambled. Nobody can read it back afterwards — not you, not us on this screen. That's why the password box is always empty, even when you come back to change it.

Your hotel guests appear on the till straight away once the details work and room charge is switched on — you don't have to wait until the next morning. If room charge is still off when you save, select Turn on and they'll load then. If we can't load them straight away, we'll say so; it doesn't mean nobody is staying, and they'll be there by the next morning at the latest.

Test connection

Select Test connection any time to check the link is still working.

Testing only reads from your property system. It never posts a charge to anyone's room, so it's always safe to press.

If nobody is staying tonight, a successful test still says Connected. An empty hotel is a perfectly good answer — it doesn't mean the link is broken.

What the statuses mean

| Status | What it means | What to do | |---|---|---| | Connected | The link works. | Nothing. | | Not connected | Nothing has been set up yet. | Enter your details. | | Not working | We saved your details, but the last check didn't succeed. | Select Test connection. If it keeps failing, check the details with your supplier. | | Password needed | Your property system accepted your details, but we couldn't keep your password. | Select Replace details and type your password in again. Test connection won't fix this on its own. If you still see this after re-entering it, contact support. |

If it won't connect

You'll see one of two different messages, and they mean different things:

• "Your property system rejected those details" — the username, password or address is wrong. Check them with your supplier and try again.
• "We could not reach your property system just now" — their system didn't answer. Your details may well be fine. Nothing was saved; try again in a few minutes, and contact your supplier if it keeps happening.

Room charge settings

Once a hotel is connected, a second panel appears with two settings. They do very different jobs.

Max outstanding bill (per room)

Any amount can go on a room. There is no nightly cap: a guest can put a whole bill on their room, however big. (The old "most a guest can put on their room per night" setting has gone — it stopped bills going on rooms, which is not what you want at the bar.)

Your property system's own credit limit for a guest doesn't stop a bill either. If a bill would take a guest past it, the till still puts it on the room and tells staff how far over it is, so they can tell reception. Your property system may then turn the charge down when it's sent overnight — if it does, it shows as Refused on the Room charges tab of Rezcontrol (in the Marketplace), and that amount needs collecting from the guest another way.

This setting is a warning for your staff, not a limit on guests.

• Put a number in — for example 1000 — and once the bar and kitchen have put £1,000.00 on a room through the till, staff can still put the next bill on it, but the till tells them "Room 31 is over its £1,000 limit — tell reception". Reception then decides what to do.
• It counts only what the bar and kitchen have put on that room through the till — not the room rate or anything else on the hotel's bill. Charges that were taken back off, or that the hotel turned down, don't count.
• It's per room. Two bookings in the same room share one total. When the guests check out, the room starts again from zero for the next ones.
• Leave it blank for no limit — staff are never warned. 0 isn't accepted, because it would warn on every single room charge.

It takes effect straight away: the till reads it every time staff pick a guest.

Department code room charges post to

This tells your property system where a room charge belongs on their side — which department it counts against, the same way you'd file it under "Bar" or "Food".

Until you fill this in, nothing reaches your property system at all. Staff can still put bills on rooms and nothing is lost — the charges are recorded and held safely at our end — but none of them will show up on a guest's room. You'll see a red warning on this panel while that's the case. Fill the code in and everything waiting goes over within a few minutes.

You need this even if you've filled in every category below. It's the catch-all for anything a category can't place — an amount typed in by hand, a service charge, or a bill the till couldn't read — and room charges wait for it before any are sent.

Ask your property system's support team which department bar and food charges should go to. It's usually a number. After you press Save, the code stays in the box and the red warning goes away — if the box comes back empty, the save didn't go through, so try again or contact support.

Where each part of a bill goes

Underneath the two settings above is a list of your menu categories with a box beside each one. Put your property system's department code in the box and room charges will be split the same way your bill is — drinks to the drinks department, food to the food one, and so on.

You do not have to fill them all in. Anything left blank goes to the single department you set above, as its own line, so nothing is ever lost. Mapping three categories and leaving thirty blank is a perfectly good place to stop.

Clearing a box puts that category back on the single department. That is how you undo a code you got wrong — you do not need to find a "right" one to replace it with.

If a guest puts a whole bill on their room, the split is exactly your bill: £20 of drinks and £10 of food arrive as £20 and £10. If they put only part of a bill on the room, it is shared out across the same categories in proportion, and the parts always add back up to the exact amount charged.

Draw your hotel map

Once a hotel is connected, select the Rooms and guests tab at the top of Rezcontrol (open it from the Marketplace). The map is what staff see on the till when they put a bill on a room: your floors, with the rooms on each in the order you walk them. Until you save a map, the till shows the same room tiles in one Rooms section — every room with a guest in it, in number order.

1. Select Fill in from Rezcontrol. It adds every room Rezcontrol has sent us so far — usually the ones that have had a guest — to a floor called Unsorted. Add the rest with Add rooms: type ranges and names separated by commas, for example 1-31 or 1-10, 12, 14-20, Willow Hall, pick the floor, and select Add rooms. Rooms already on the map are skipped; up to 300 at a time.
2. Select + Add a floor for each floor or building — for example Ground floor, First floor, Coach house.
3. Move each room to its floor with the drop-down on the room, and put rooms in order with the arrows. Rename a floor by typing over its name.
4. Select Save map. Nothing changes on the till until you do.

Add quiet rooms by hand. Your property system only tells us about a room once a guest has stayed in it, so a room nobody has used yet won't be there. Type it into + Add room on the right floor, spelled exactly the way your property system spells it.

Checked against Rezcontrol shows how many rooms on your map your property system knows. A room it has never sent gets a warning — for example "Room 32 isn't in Rezcontrol — check the spelling". That's fine for a quiet room; if it's a typo, take it off and add it again. Letters and spaces are matched without caring about capitals, so willow hall and Willow Hall are the same room.

Taking a room off the map with × only removes it from the plan — a room your property system knows can't be deleted. A room you added by hand is deleted. Either way, a guest staying in a room that isn't on the map still shows on the till, under Other rooms, so nobody is ever missed.

Hotel accounts

Your property system keeps a few accounts for the hotel's own bookkeeping — usually named ADMIN, ADMIN2 and so on, and UNALLOCATED. They aren't guest rooms, so we hide them from staff automatically: they never appear on the till, and nobody can put a bar bill on one by mistake.

They're listed under Hotel accounts with a Hidden from staff switch. If one of them really is somewhere staff should be able to charge, switch it off and select Save map. We'll never switch it back behind your back — the morning update from your property system leaves your choice alone.

Turning it off

Select Turn off to stop staff putting bills on rooms. Your details stay saved, so you can turn it back on without setting it up again.

Trying it out without a property system

If you'd like to see room charge working on the till before you have a property system to point at, select Use the built-in test hotel. There's nothing to type — no address, no username, no password.

It gives you a small pretend hotel: a handful of rooms and a few guests. Ring up a tab, put it — or part of it — on one of the rooms, and take the rest on the card, the same way a real one behaves. One of the pretend guests has a credit limit at their "hotel", so you can also see what happens when the property system itself says no.

Nothing you charge to the test hotel reaches any hotel. No guest is ever billed, and none of it appears on a real bill or folio. Because that would be an expensive thing to be confused about, we say so on every screen it could be mistaken on: while the test hotel is connected, a warning sits at the top of the Setup tab and at the top of Room charges, and it can't be dismissed. The connection is also named Test hotel (not real) rather than your supplier's name.

Switching to your real hotel

Only one hotel can be switched on at a time, so the order matters:

1. Turn off the test hotel.
2. Select Enter your property system details and connect yours as above.
3. Turn on the real connection.

We never turn a hotel off for you. If you try to connect the test hotel while your own property system is switched on, you'll be told to turn yours off first — quietly swapping a working link for a pretend one would send every charge after it nowhere.