General manager guide, part 1: your overview and your role

This is part 1 of 4 of the Xenia general manager guide: 1. Your overview and your role · 2. Approvals and keeping control · 3. Running the day · 4. Menus, rates, stock and your team.

This guide is for the general manager: the person who runs the hotel day to day, answers for the money, and is the one the front desk, the bar and the restaurant come to for a yes. It uses a made-up hotel, Sunrise Hotel in Lagos, so no real guest or figure appears. The owner setup guide covers how the hotel was set up, and the front desk guide shows what your team sees.

Get in

The owner invites you by email with the General Manager role. Follow the link, add your name, phone number (with the country code) and a password of at least 10 characters with upper and lower case letters and a number, agree to the terms and choose Create account and join. The link works once and expires after a week. Then open Security and turn on two-step sign-in: your account can approve money, so a stolen password must not be enough.

The overview

You land on Overview, which says how the hotel is doing today. The eight boxes across the top are:

• In house: guests staying now, and the share of the rooms they fill.

• Arrivals: guests checked in today.

• Departures: how many have left of those due out today, and how many are still to leave.

• Revenue today, with the month so far underneath.

• Payments taken today.

• Still owed: what guests owe on their open bills, and how many bills that is.

• Out of service: rooms that cannot be sold.

• Open alerts: things Xenia noticed that are worth a look.

Below the boxes are two charts, Revenue, last 30 days and Occupancy, last 30 days, then a card for Yesterday with a button to open the daily report, and a card called Needs your attention that shows any alerts waiting.

In the top right are two small badges. The shield counts the approvals waiting for you, and the bell counts your notifications. Choose either to open it.

Your menu

A general manager has almost the whole menu. The parts you will use most, and where this guide covers them:

• Approvals, Alerts, Audit trail and Cashier shifts: keeping control (part 2).

• Front desk, Room board, Bookings, Folios, Guests, Reports, Outlet reports, Daily report and Night audit: running the day (part 3).

• Outlets and menu, Price rules, Rates, Rooms, Store, Stock items, Staff and Hotel settings: setting things up and looking after your team (part 4).

What stays with the owner

Some things are deliberately not on your menu. Roles, Billing, Hotels and Guest payments (where the card and transfer money is paid out to) are the owner's, and the owner is the only one who can run the audit trail's integrity check. They are kept apart from day to day running so that no single manager can change the safeguards, the plan or where the hotel's money goes.

Next: Part 2: approvals and keeping control.