A booking is not a stay, a checkout is not a room you can sell, and a payment attempt is not money received. Firelinkx builds hotel software that keeps those distinctions, so the front desk, housekeeping, and the night audit are all working from the same record.
Owners, property managers, and front-office leads running between eight and eighty rooms, where reservations arrive by phone and WhatsApp as well as online, and where the same person may take a booking in the morning and close the till at night.
A booking comes in by phone while another is being taken on WhatsApp and a walk-in is at the desk. The sheet catches up later, and the double-booking is discovered at check-in, when the only fix is an apology.
Staff need to tell apart what was reserved, who actually arrived, which room they were put in, who is still in-house, and what changed mid-stay. Collapsing that into a single status is what makes the arrivals list disagree with the corridor.
Checkout, cleaning, inspection, and maintenance are separate facts. When they are one verbal handoff, the desk sells a room that has not been cleaned, and the guest finds out first.
Open folios, a cashier drawer that is short, a card payment nobody confirmed, and a departure that was never completed. Each one carries into tomorrow, and by the end of the month nobody can reconstruct which night it started.
The system follows a room through a full cycle, and each stage writes a record the next stage depends on. That is what stops the night audit from being an exercise in remembering.
Define room types and the physical rooms under them, then hold availability by date. Rate plans, minimum stays, and closeouts sit on top so a rule change does not require editing individual days.
Record where the booking came from, what was quoted, what deposit is due, and when an unconfirmed hold expires. Holds that expire release their rooms without anyone remembering to.
Work the expected-arrivals list, confirm guest details, and assign a room that is actually eligible. If the guest moves rooms later, the move is part of the stay history and not an overwrite.
Post charges, take deposits and payments, route charges between folios, and reverse mistakes as corrections that stay visible. Every posting carries the staff member who made it.
Departure closes the stay and raises the housekeeping job in the same action. Anything unresolved on the folio stays flagged for follow-up rather than closing quietly.
Housekeeping is assigned and its outcome recorded. A failed inspection raises maintenance work, and the room does not return to sellable until the release rule is satisfied.
Opening and closing counts, tender totals, and corrections are recorded per session, so an overage or shortage belongs to a person and a shift instead of to the day in general.
Blocking exceptions are listed before the business date can close, so problems are resolved on the night they happened, when someone still remembers what occurred.
These are the records the rest of the system is built on, kept separate because staff need to ask different questions of each.
Front office, housekeeping, maintenance, and management need different authority, and the ones that cost money need it explicitly.
Each of these holds a person's name until it is resolved. None of them can be closed by ignoring it.
Reports come out of the records staff already keep, so running one costs nothing and nobody assembles it by hand.
Very few properties should build all of this at once. The first release covers one operating problem end to end, runs for real staff on real bookings, and earns the budget for the next stage.
A property management system is a full custom application, so the honest answer is that the number depends on how much of the property is in the first release. These are the lanes Firelinkx quotes within.
From US$199
A Tech Roadmap Audit that establishes whether to build, buy an off-the-shelf property system, or fix what you have. The fee is credited toward the project if you build with Firelinkx.
$4,500 - $6,500
One part of the operation with its own records, roles, and reports. For most properties that is reservations and front desk, or housekeeping and room release, running for real staff before anything else is added.
Paid discovery first
Custom roles, payment handling, and third-party connections put this in the platform lane, where a build quote follows discovery. Local platform builds usually start from $4,000 to $8,500 after discovery, with corporate and regulated work higher.
Every proposal separates the one-time build from the monthly operations that follow it. See full pricing for how both are structured.
Review representative records, current tools, staff responsibilities, handoffs, delays, and exceptions.
Specify records, states, permissions, approvals, integrations, reports, and acceptance checks.
Deliver working stages that staff can test against representative scenarios before the scope expands.
Plan data migration, training, deployment, support responsibilities, and the operational cutover.
Bring a representative job, record, exception, or report. Firelinkx will help define the users, controls, integrations, and first useful release.