Front Desk overview

Who this is for: Front Desk, Manager, Owner — requires frontdesk.reservation.read at minimum. Where: Front Desk

Front Desk is the module you work in during a shift. Everything a guest experiences between booking and leaving happens here: the bookings you work through each morning, the rack you assign rooms on, the folio a charge lands on, and the payment that closes it out.

Note

This section uses the default terminology. Your house may have renamed these terms under Settings → White-label.

The five screens#

Front Desk carries what a shift actually touches, and nothing else:

Screen	What it is for
Reservations	The book of business — find any booking, and work it from its own page
Room Rack	Rooms down, nights across — who goes where
Guests	The person behind the booking, and their history
Guest Folio	What a stay owes, what it has paid, and the invoice that closes it
Stay-Time Policies	The clock times a rate is sold against

Things a property configures rather than works are not in that list. They moved to where the rest of the configuration lives:

What	Where it is now
Room inventory and categories	Settings → Room Category
A room's physical position, by floor	Settings → Floor Plan
The ancillary catalog	Settings → Ancillary
Taking a room out of order	Engineering → Room Maintenance

Old links still work — /frontdesk/rooms, /frontdesk/ancillary, /frontdesk/folios, /frontdesk/payments and /frontdesk/groups all forward to the screen that took the work over.

Who works here#

Role	What they can do here
Front Desk	Everything in this section — reservations, check-in and check-out, room assignment, folios, payments and refunds, guest profiles. Front Desk also holds Housekeeping status.
Manager	All of the above, plus the CRS and Revenue modules.
Owner	Everything.
Read-only	Can read reservations. No mutations anywhere in this section.

Roles are configurable per organisation, so treat that table as the default bundle. The precise statement is the permission on each page's header line — a screen appears in your sidebar exactly when your role carries it and the owning app is enabled on the property.

Nobody's permissions changed when the screens moved. Room Maintenance in particular is reachable by anyone who could already block a room, as well as by anyone holding the engineering permission.

What's in this section#

Stays

• Create, find, change and cancel a reservation — the book of business. frontdesk.reservation.read
• The room rack: assign, move, look ahead — assign, drag, look up to 90 days ahead. frontdesk.room.assign
• Room categories, and the rooms behind them — what the house sells, and which rooms are behind it. frontdesk.room.block
• The floor plan: floors, background images and room markers — the same rooms, laid out by physical position. frontdesk.room.block
• Guest profiles, history and merging duplicates — frontdesk.guest.read

Engineering

• Take a room out of order — blocks, timed work, and clearing them. frontdesk.room.block or engineering.maintenance.manage

Billing

• Folios: post, split and transfer charges — frontdesk.folio.post
• Taking payments and issuing refunds — frontdesk.payment.take
• Group bookings and master-folio routing — frontdesk.folio.post

All three are one screen — Guest Folio, with a Folios / Group binders switch. Charging a stay, collecting for it and settling it were always one piece of work.

Arrivals and departures

Checking a guest in and out are actions on the stay, taken from the reservation: open the booking from Reservations and use Check in, Check out or Cancel on the stay. Filter the reservations list by check-in date for today's arrivals and by check-out date for today's departures.

• Check a guest in — what check-in does to a stay. frontdesk.checkin
• Walk-ins — booking and arriving in one pass. frontdesk.checkin
• Check a guest out — the balance and the receipt. frontdesk.checkout

Policies

• Stay-time policies — check-in and check-out clock times. frontdesk.reservation.read
• Set up the ancillary catalog — the extras you sell against a stay. frontdesk.ancillary.sell

How it connects#

Housekeeping says whether a room is fit to hand over. Readiness is tracked on the room status board, and the property's check-in requires ready room policy is set under Settings → Hotel → Policy. Read readiness and the check-in gate for how the two fit together — it is the reason Housekeeping is documented alongside this section rather than after it. The same housekeeping status is what colours a room's marker on the floor plan.

CRS owns what you sell; Front Desk owns what you deliver. Rates, availability, restrictions and channel connectivity all live in CRS. A booking that arrives from a channel lands in your reservations list here.

Engineering decides what you cannot sell. A room out of order is off the market for those dates everywhere — the rack shows it, availability honours it, and the desk cannot assign into it.

Accounting closes the day. Every folio posting and payment you take flows to the ledger, and the night audit rolls the business date forward. A stay you leave with an unsettled balance is a stay the audit will surface.