SambaPOS for Hotel/Bar/Restaurant?

[whiterabbit]

Hi,

We are considering using SambaPOS for our hotel/bar/restaurant.  One of the issues that I see using your software is that we cannot close the work period while tickets are still open.  Generally when we have guests staying with us we open a ticket and just leave it open until they check out and pay the bill.

Now with the reports section of the software it seems that even if you select just today's date you still see the report for the entire work period regardless of how long it has been open.  So it would be difficult to figure out what has been sold for just today.  Now I know you can export a CSV file which may help with this issue.  But its not as easy to see what is suppose to be in the cash drawer at the end if each shift.

But, it appears that you cannot adjust stock while a work period is still open so that would cause issues as well.

There is the possibility of transferring all open tickets to customer accounts, but what I don't like is once they are in the customer account it can be difficult to see the total they might owe if they are staying with us over several days.  You end up with many different tickets under the same customer account.  The way I see it now to see a total you would have to go to cash drawer, find their account, and see the total, but you can't pull up the tickets from there.  You have to go back to find tickets and you end up again, with several tickets.  Most customers want to see the total bill, and we would have to print out several tickets for each time we transferred their open tickets to their customer accounts.

The easiest solution would be if there was a way to close the work period while tickets were still open, but I think i already know the answer to this question.

So, does anyone have experience using sambapos with a hotel?  Any tips?

[emre]

Hello whiterabbit.
First of all thank you for the detailed instructions.

SambaPOS is a community project. For now I'm the only code contributor but I hope we'll attract more developer attention to the project in the future. I mean this project is nobody's. You own it like you own the park next to your home or any community place in your city. So anybody who have time can help us for better features.

We are developing newer version of SambaPOS under github.com. You can read more about V3 version here http://emreeren.github.com/SambaPOS-3/

In this version I'm planing to create better support for hotel use. Booking features are not ready yet but primarily I want to solve some issues you mentioned.

V3 version have a feature called resources. By creating a resource template you will be able to define different types of tables and you can create accounts for them. That means tables and customers are different resource types and you can add more resource types called "room" or anything else. So we may have accounts tied to rooms like customer accounts.

Keeping tickets open until it gets paid is not a good practice. When we finish using it we should close it by moving the amount to the room account. At the end we may move it to a customer account for later pay or directly close room account by receiving payments.

We have another feature called "resource states" for keeping record of state change dates of resources (rooms in your case) such as available, occupied, cleaning, etc. If we list all tickets created after state changed to occupied we'll know what sold to a room after it occupied.

What we need to do is optimize these features for hotel use and implement other needed features for easier usage. If you like the idea and want to help us on V3 development by suggesting and testing features we'll be happy to hear from you. You may have more information about downloading nightly releases from the link.

Thanks.

[whiterabbit]

Hi,

Thanks for the response.  I downloaded V3 a few days ago and started playing with it a bit.  There are a lot of differences between it and V2 when it come to getting everything setup.  I am having trouble understanding how to setup tables as there is no longer a tables settings in the Manage section.  Did they get moved to another area?

The resources and resources states sounds like a good option.  Could you point me to some documentation on these and how to set them up?

I would definitely be interested in helping SambaPOS become more hotel friendly.  Let me know what we can do.

Cheers!

[emre]

Hello whiterabbit. There is no documentation for V3 at the moment but as asked I'm planing to create tutorials for demonstrating basic features.

To be able to use it out of restaurants we abstracted some features and gave most control to the user. A table, customer, room, waiter or anything we can assign to a ticket are now called a "Resource". If you create a resource template called "Table" and if you choose table template while creating a resource it becomes a table. By creating table screens you'll create V2 Table Views. Table states (available, occupied and bill requested) states was hard coded. With V3 we may create custom states by creating resource states. By evaluating default settings I hope you'll be understand how tables and customers configured.

Use or naming of these features might change until we reach beta state. For now I'm trying to do it by myself. If more people helps us on finding bugs or suggesting new things (or maybe on development?) we'll reach to that point faster. After reaching beta state we'll be able to create documentation.

Thanks.

[hotelogix]

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Admin edit: please don't post spam here. You can advertise your software here but you can do it if it is open source or really helpful. I removed your link.

[stanleysct]

We prefer OPEN SOURCE