Inventory and Availability

Inventory (/inventory-management) is the grid that decides what the property can sell, for how much, and under what conditions. Rows are your room types with their rate plans nested under them; columns are dates. It is the one screen where you close a date, drop a price for a soft week, or set a two-night minimum over a holiday — and it is the source every channel and the booking engine sells from.

Unlike the rest of the PMS, this page does not save as you type. Every edit is staged as a draft, the grid marks it, and nothing leaves your browser until you press Save and confirm the review. That is deliberate: a save goes out as a single request and a single push to your channels, so a week of price changes is one clean sync rather than thirty.

Where it lives

Front Desk → Inventory in the sidebar. Reading the grid needs the Inventory: read permission; changing availability needs Inventory: write, and changing prices or restrictions needs Rate plan: write. The Front Desk system role has read only, so an agent sees the numbers but cannot save. See Roles and Permissions.

Key terms

Availability — AVL, the units of a room type free to sell on a date. Innvera keeps it moving on its own as bookings land and cancel; editing it here overrides that number.

Total units — how many units of the type exist on that date. Availability can never exceed it.

Availability offset — AVO, units held back from channels. Subtracted from availability before the push; your own number is untouched.

Max availability — MAL, a ceiling on how many units are offered in total. Units already sold count against it.

Restriction — a per-rate-plan, per-date rule: Stop Sell, Min Stay Arrival, Min Stay Through, Max Stay, Closed to Arrival, Closed to Departure.

Reading the grid

The Rates / Restrictions tabs at the top left switch which rows are drawn. Both always show availability.

Under each room type's name band sits a row of N avail counts — red at 0, amber at 2 or fewer. Then:

The same codes are spelled out in the legend along the bottom of the page.

Only active rate plans appear. Past days are tinted and today's column is outlined. A cell showing - (rates) or 0 (availability) has no inventory row behind it for that date, which means genuinely unsellable rather than missing — it cannot be edited in place; use a bulk update to create the rows.

The first column is frozen and carries a room-type filter: click it to search your types and pick one, or All room types to show everything.

Navigate dates

The grid opens on today plus 13 days.

• ‹ and › shift the window by its own length.
• The date range picker sets any start and end; the span dropdown (1w, 2w, 3w, 30d) sets the length from the current start.
• Today jumps the window back to today, keeping its length.
• At most 30 days are drawn. Pick more and Showing the first 30 days of the selected range appears under the toolbar. Ranges are capped at 183 days (about six months), noted as Date range is limited to 183 days (about 6 months).

Staged edits survive moving the window — they are remembered against the room type, date and field, not against a position on screen — so a long range can be staged a window at a time and saved in one go.

Edit a cell

The reset button (the circular arrow) discards every staged change after a Discard unsaved changes? confirmation. Refresh, under the gear, reloads from the server; with drafts pending it first warns Refreshing will reload data from the server. Your unsaved edits will stay staged, but the numbers on screen may no longer match what you will save. Leaving the page with unsaved edits prompts the browser's own warning.

Change a whole range at once

Three tools, in increasing order of reach.

Select cells

Hold ⌘ / Ctrl and click cells to add them to a selection, or ⌘ / Ctrl-drag across a run of days for a range. Esc clears it. The modifier is required because an unmodified click still has to mean edit this cell.

A selection lives inside one row, since one row is one series and one value can mean the same thing across it. The footer replaces the legend with Update selected and Clear. Update selected opens Update N cells, which offers:

• How — Set to a value, or, for prices only, Increase / decrease.
• The value itself: a number, or On / Off for a toggle row.
• For a price adjustment, a + / − direction and a unit of Percent or Fixed amount.
• A Preview of the resulting values before you apply them.

Applying stages the cells as ordinary drafts — you still have to Save.

Fill a range from a row

The wand button beside a row's label opens a small From / To / Value popover over the visible dates. It is quicker than selecting when you want the whole fortnight at one number.

Bulk Update Inventory

The layers button in the toolbar opens the Bulk Update Inventory sheet, which reaches beyond the visible window and beyond one row:

Each field has its own tick box — only ticked fields are written, so you can raise the rate over every Friday in a quarter without touching anything else. Both room-type and rate-plan lists have a search box.

The sheet refuses to submit until it makes sense, with a toast saying why: Enable at least one field to update., Select at least one room type for availability updates., Select at least one rate plan for rate/restriction updates., Availability cannot exceed 999., Rate cannot exceed 1,000,000., Stay nights cannot exceed 365. On success the toast reports N updated, M created — "created" counts date rows that did not exist yet.

What moves availability on its own

You rarely have to type an availability number. Innvera adjusts it as the property runs:

Editing the Availability row overrides whatever that arithmetic produced. Use it to hold rooms back or to correct a drift — not as a routine way to open and close dates, which is what Stop Sell and a 0 are for.

How channels consume it

Every save writes one message to the outbox, and a worker pushes the affected room types and date spans to Channex within seconds; Channex fans it out to every mapped channel. A multi-room-type, multi-date save is delivered as one call, which is why the grid batches rather than saving per cell.

The number a channel sees is not always the number in the cell:

• AVO is subtracted first. Availability 10 with an offset of 2 is pushed as 8, while the PMS still shows 10.
• MAL caps the total offered, and units already sold eat into the cap. With 10 units, a MAL of 8 and one booking, the push is 7.
• Neither ever goes below 0.

To close a rate plan on some dates, switch its Stop Sell on. To close a room type, set its availability to 0 — availability applies to every rate plan under the type. The full picture, including retries, failures and manual resyncs, is in Availability and Rate Sync.

Empty states and errors

Common mistakes

• Leaving the page with the Save button still solid. Staged edits are only in your browser. The browser warns you, but the warning is easy to click through.
• Raising availability above total units. The save is rejected whole. Set Total Units in the bulk sheet first if the property genuinely has more rooms.
• Using bulk update as a draft. It writes straight away; only the grid stages.
• Expecting a cell edit to fix an OTA. The push is one-way. A channel that is out of step needs a resync from Settings → Channel Manager, not another edit here.

Related

• Rate Plans
• Availability and Rate Sync
• Room Types and Rooms
• Calendar