Need for Hotelier Lite Hotelier Lite was recently developed to meet a specific need in the industry. The original Hotelier Premium has, over the years, become quite feature-rich in that it caters for almost all of the requirements of all establishments. To maintain the balance between having all the features AND being easy to use becomes a major challenge for the system developers In order to move away from the 'one size fits all' concept, we extracted what we deem to be the essential requirements from Hotelier, and introduced Hotelier Lite The niche market for Hotelier Lite is the owner operated Guest House with up to 8 rooms. As an example, in order to maintain a tight control over capturing of data, we need to know who captured the data, and because various staff use the system at any time of day, it is necessary for the staff member to enter their sign-on code prior to performing any task. That is how Hotelier tracks who did what on the system. In Hotelier Lite, we bypass this, assuming that the owner or another responsible person worked on the system. As can be seen, functionality is always a trade-off against ease of use. Functionality Hotelier Lite provides a simplified yet comprehensive management system for the average owner-run Guest House. A typical booking scenario would be as follows: Assume a telephone enquiry is received. The caller will specify the required dates for the booking. The receptionist will have a calendar showing all the rooms (for a 30 day period) and will ascertain the availability. Once this has been established, and a rate negotiated, the operator will request certain information from the caller. The minimum information required to make a booking is the guest name, dates, market source (how they heard about you) and a contact detail (tel no, fax, email etc). Once taken, a 'Confirmation Letter' can be emailed off requesting the deposit or confirming the booking, together with cancellation policy, banking details etc. Upon arrival, the guest is checked into the system. All extras, such as meals, laundry, beverages can then be charged directly to the guest account. When the guest checks out, the final payment is completed, and the booking is put into the history database. Bookings are never deleted from the system. There is a facility to checkout even though there is an outstanding balance (for later payment)