Key Concepts

Innvera uses a small set of words precisely, and the rest of the documentation assumes them. Most confusion on a first day comes from three pairs: a room type is not a room, a reservation is not the same as the accommodation inside it, and a room's housekeeping status is not its occupancy status. This page defines each term, says where you see it in the PMS, and points to the module that owns it.

Property

A property (called a hotel in a few places, such as the Select Your Hotel dialog) is one accommodation business: one name, one timezone, one currency, one check-in and check-out time, one address. Everything else — rooms, guests, reservations, folios, staff, channel connections — belongs to exactly one property. Your session is always scoped to a single property; switch with the property name in the navbar.

A property carries a status shown as a badge next to its name: Pending verification (new, not yet approved by the platform), Active (verified, visible to guests) or Suspended. The timezone matters more than it looks: "today", arrivals, departures and the same-day check-in rule are all judged on the property's clock, not on your laptop's.

Room type vs room

Room type — a category you sell: "Deluxe King", "Dorm Bed", "Family Suite". It has a code, a description, an occupancy (adults, children, infants), a count of rooms, a kind (Room or Dorm) and its own rate plans and images. Availability, rates and restrictions are all managed per room type, and that is what you sell on the booking engine and on channels.

Room — one physical unit inside a room type: "101", "DK-03". A room has a number, an optional housekeeping section, a housekeeping condition and an occupancy status. Guests are checked into rooms; rooms are cleaned; rooms go out of order. The Calendar shows one row per room, grouped under its room type.

The number of rooms a room type is configured with (Count of rooms) and the number of real rooms you have created can differ; the Calendar counts the real rooms.

Reservation vs booking vs accommodation

Reservation — the booking record. One booker (the guest), one property, one status, one source, one folio, one set of notes. In the sidebar the list of reservations is labelled Bookings, and the two words mean the same thing in Innvera; the record itself is always a reservation.

Accommodation — one room-stay inside a reservation: a room type, an optional assigned room, its own check-in and check-out dates, its own adult/child/infant counts and its own amount. Every reservation has at least one accommodation. A booking for two rooms from Booking.com arrives as one reservation with two accommodations, and the Calendar draws it as two bars. The Accommodations tab on the reservation page lists them. In the code and on the Calendar these are also called segments.

A reservation's headline room type, room and dates are those of its first accommodation.

Reservation statuses

A hold is confirmed, released or left to expire. Confirmed reservations can be checked in, cancelled or marked no-show. In-house reservations can only be checked out. The last three statuses are final. See Statuses and Lifecycle.

Rate plan, rate and price

Rate plan — the rule a stay is sold under. It belongs to one room type and has a name and code, a sell mode (per room or per person), a rate mode (manual or derived from a parent plan), a meal type, children and infant fees, and a week-pattern of restrictions. Examples: "BAR", "Non-refundable", "Bed & Breakfast".

Rate (or price) — the amount per night. A rate plan holds one rate per occupancy (1 guest, 2 guests, …) with one marked as primary; the Inventory grid lets you override the rate on specific dates. The reservation's Amount is what that came to for the whole stay, in the property's currency, taxes included.

Restrictions — per-date switches on a rate plan that control what can be sold: Stop Sell, Closed to Arrival, Closed to Departure, Min Stay Arrival, Min Stay Through, Max Stay. Innvera checks them when a reservation is created.

Inventory — how many units of a room type are on sale on a given date (Available Units out of Total Units), plus an offset and a cap that only channels use.

Policy

Policies are the rules you publish about a stay, and Innvera keeps them in three places.

Settings → Property → General holds the property's own check-in and check-out times and the flat Early Check-in Charge and Late Check-out Charge.

Settings → Property → Stay Rules turns those flat charges into fee ladders — a grace window, then brackets by time of day, each a flat amount or a percentage of an average night — and holds the no-show policy: what a no-show costs, whether unarrived guests are marked automatically each morning, and whether the channel is told.

Settings → Property → OTA Policy holds the structured record channels require (pets, smoking, parking, internet, adults-only) and is pushed to Channex. Separately, the guest-facing Policies page carries the cancellation tiers, deposit terms and house rules shown on the booking engine; the default cancellation tier is also what a no-show falls back to.

Folio

The folio is the ledger of one reservation: room charges, taxes, extra charges, discounts, adjustments, fees, and the payments against them. It is created automatically with the reservation and its balance is what the guest still owes. A folio is Open while it has a balance, Settled when the balance reaches zero (a new charge reopens it), and Closed once the guest has checked out — nothing can be posted to a closed folio. Payments have a type (Payment, Deposit, Prepayment, Refund, Write-off) and a source (guest, OTA, corporate, voucher). Find it on the Folio tab of any reservation and under Accounting.

Guest profile

A guest is the booker: first and last name, email, phone and country, plus a profile with identity document type and number, date of birth, address and free-text notes. Guests are shared across all of a property's reservations, so the same person booking twice should be one guest with two stays. Named occupants of a room (the people actually sleeping in it, as sent by an OTA) are listed on the accommodation and are not separate guest records. See Guests.

Booking source and channel

Every reservation records where it came from:

A channel is one connected OTA. Channel reservations have their dates and room type frozen until check-in, because Innvera does not push those changes back to the OTA.

Roles and permissions

Access is by role. Innvera ships seven system roles — Administrator, Front Desk, Attendant, Supervisor, Storekeeper, Accountant and Read-only — and the property owner can clone and customise them. Each role grants actions (read, write, cancel, post, assign, close and so on) on resources such as reservations, folios, rooms, housekeeping or accounting, and a person's permissions are the union of their roles. Every sidebar entry is gated on one of those permissions, so your role literally decides your menu. The owner can do everything and is the only person who can manage roles. See Roles and Permissions.

Housekeeping status vs occupancy status

A room carries two independent states.

Housekeeping condition — whether the room can be sold: Ready (clean and inspected — the only sellable condition), Clean (cleaned, awaiting inspection), Dirty (needs cleaning) and Out of Order (blocked for maintenance, a deep clean or a renovation). Check-out normally marks the room Dirty; housekeeping tasks move it to Clean and an inspection (or a property that does not require inspection) moves it to Ready.

Occupancy status — whether someone is physically in it right now: Occupied or Vacant. Check-in sets Occupied; check-out sets Vacant. It has no dates attached, so an occupied room is still assignable for a future stay.

When a room shows a single badge, Innvera picks the most important state: Out of Order beats Occupied, which beats Clean, which beats Dirty. Only a Ready room can be assigned to a reservation or auto-assigned when one is created.

Related

• Navigating the PMS
• Reservations
• Rooms and Rates
• Inventory and Availability