For your team
A guest uses it for a week. Your team uses it every shift.
Every system like this dies the same way, and it is never the guest app that kills it. Acknowledging an order takes five taps, the floor quietly stops doing it, and three weeks later the hotel says the software did not work. So the staff app was designed first and the guest app second — and the number everything else was arranged around is two.
- Two taps to acknowledge
- Your department only
- Runs on the phone they already carry
Try it
Press the button, and watch the guest’s phone change.
This is the whole interaction. A ticket arrives, somebody presses Acknowledge, and the guest is told — without a phone call, a radio, or anyone walking to reception. Press it again to start the job.
It matters because of what it replaces. The alternative is a printed docket, a shout down a corridor, and a guest who has no idea whether anything is happening.
Kitchen queue
Oldest first · 3 open
Club sandwich · Still water
Room service · 2 min ago
Extra towels ×2
Housekeeping · 4 min ago
Late checkout, 14:00
Front desk · 6 min ago
Room 412 sees: Waiting to be picked up
The queue
Sorted by what is about to go wrong
Not by what arrived first, which is the order that lets the oldest ticket sit there while newer ones get handled.
- Ageing, visibly
- Each ticket shows how long it has been open against its department’s target. The queue reorders as things age, so the thing that needs doing is the thing at the top.
- Escalation without a supervisor
- A breach raises itself to a manager. Nobody has to be watching, which is the point: the shifts when this matters are the shifts when nobody has time to watch.
- One basket, the right number of tickets
- A guest ordering food and towels together creates two tickets for two teams. Neither team sees a task that is not theirs, and neither can close the other’s.
- It buzzes
- Push to the devices your team already carries. A phone that stops buzzing is how a hotel goes back to shouting down a corridor, so staff are asked for permission by a bar that stays until the answer is yes — rather than once, at the worst possible moment.
- Delay is a first-class answer
- A kitchen that is twenty minutes behind can say so, and the guest is told. The alternative is a ticket that sits in progress while somebody hopes, and a guest who rings reception.
- The full history stays
- Who acknowledged it, who started it, who completed it and when. It is how a complaint gets answered with a fact.
Teams
Who may do what
A team is a name and a set of permissions. Tick the ones that team needs; the console offers exactly that and nothing more.
Reception confirming a table, a chef working the kitchen queue, a duty manager changing tonight’s capacity and a marketing manager sending a campaign are four different jobs, and a single shared login is how a property ends up with prices nobody meant to change.
Two things about how it is built are worth knowing, because they are what make it trustworthy rather than decorative. First, an owner or manager keeps full access from their role whatever is ticked, so a property cannot lock itself out of its own teams screen. Second, permissions decide what the console offers — what is actually permitted is decided by the database, which is checked whether the request came from our screen or from anywhere else.
Still honest about
What we have not built yet
Because the list of what a product cannot do is the part that tells you whether to believe the rest.
- Rotas
- Who is on duty is not modelled, so a new order notifies everyone in that department plus managers. For a small team that is correct. A large property will want a rota first, and we will say so rather than let you find out.
- Two-factor for staff
- Staff sign in with an email address and a password. Two-factor is outstanding and is on the list before a property with a large front office goes live.
- Offline for staff
- Guest submissions queue and retry. The staff queue expects a connection; in a basement laundry it will tell you it has lost one rather than pretending.
“If acknowledging an order takes more than two taps, the hotel stops using it — and blames the software.”
Questions
The usual ones
What does a waiter actually have to do?
Open the queue and press Acknowledge. The queue opens on the oldest open ticket and Acknowledge is the widest thing on the screen. Starting and completing are one press each after that, and the guest is told at every step without anyone typing a message.
Does every member of staff see every request?
No. A department sees its own queue. Housekeeping never sees the kitchen’s tickets. That is enforced by the database on every query rather than by hiding a screen, so it holds for an integration as well as for the app.
What stops an order being forgotten?
Every department has an acknowledgement target and the queue is sorted by what is closest to breaching it, not by what arrived first. A breach escalates to a manager by itself. Nothing depends on somebody noticing.
Do staff need a company phone?
No. It runs in the browser on whatever they already carry, and can be added to the home screen. Notifications use the browser’s own push service, so there is no per-message cost and no separate app store build.
How do we control who can change prices?
Teams. A team is a name and a set of permissions, and you tick what that team may do. An owner or a manager always keeps full access from their role, so a property cannot lock itself out of its own teams screen. The permissions decide what the console offers; the database decides what is permitted.
How long does training take?
For the queue, minutes — it is one screen and one button. Managers using the console take longer, mostly because the console can do more. We walk a property through it during onboarding rather than handing over a manual.
Show it to the people who will actually use it.
We would rather demo to a head of housekeeping than a boardroom. If the floor likes it, the rest follows.