Five Star Front Office Program Features

Overall

• Easy to use. Surveys of our users consistently show that new front desk staff consider ease of use the greatest asset of Five Star.
• Fully integrated, meaning that when you enter information in one module, all others know about it immediately. This saves you steps, reduces errors, improves the timeliness of reporting etc. and generally makes your business easier to manage.
• No month end or year end special procedures, the system does it all automatically.
• Powerful and easy to use security system makes software features invisible for users who don't have access to them, and can ease learning fears by making the system appear to have fewer features.
• Pop up windows, speed searches, fuzzy-text searches, on every field in the system makes it unnecessary to remember codes.
• The Bookmark feature found on the toolbar allows you to do any two or more things at once. For example, you might be entering a list if charges from the dining room when the phone rings for a reservation. A few clicks of the mouse and you are taking it. When done, a few clicks more and you are right back to your Record Charges screen.
• Any report or inquiry can be printed, viewed on screen, stored as a file, or emailed. And using the unique SmartViewertm feature any report can instantly become any of the following formatted files: Lotus, Excel, Word, Access, HTML, or txt.

New Users - Learning

• Extensive use of Lotus Screen Cam ™ show and tell software for learning all of the skills you use every day. No manual or text help can come close to the effectiveness of this learning technique.
• There is always a complete copy of your property in the Five Star ‘Learning Hotel’ for new users to practice on.
• Over 20 Canadian colleges, universities and other schools use Five Star to teach automated front office management in their hospitality programs. You can ask for Five Star experience in job postings and get it!
• Standard mode help pops up context-sensitive help in every field and at every menu option, for comprehensive, meaningful information. Edit the F1 help to fit your own needs. In any field/menu option press F1 for help, click the cop to edit.
• ‘Cheat Sheets’ come with every system – the one page easy-to-follow sheet for last minute learning about reservations, check-ins and checkouts. You’re out of school now, and cheat sheets are legal here!
• Troubleshooting Guide – the most valuable 20 pages we have ever published. This little booklet will save you the cost of after hours support calls, because it contains the 20 things we have gotten calls for after hours (and during support plan hours too). Always check this booklet for a solution before calling. People who use it never call us. Make many copies of it, give it to all staff especially new staff, and give it to managers to take home for calls after their shift ends. It WORKS!
• Night Auditor Balancing Worksheets you can copy and use for your night audit. Saves you the trouble of designing your own, and ensures proper accounting control and accuracy of numbers.

All together, no other software program offers you as much to help you get up and running fast, and to keep you there.

Back to the menu.

Hotel Setup

• Define unlimited types of rooms like smoking, nonsmoking, standard, luxury, single, double, cottage etc.).
• Take a photo of each room and store it in the room screen. When a guest at the desk wants to see a room show him the photo. (Tip: Take the picture AFTER housekeeping goes through the room!)
• Identify extensive room attributes (view, characteristics, facilities etc.), connections to other rooms.
• Define unlimited rate types, like rack, corporate, government, seniors, special, etc.
• Set up rates for next year now. You can take reservations as far into the future as you want.
• Set up all your corporate and direct bill names & addresses. Handle direct bills & invoices quickly & professionally.
• Save a tree! Specify which night audit reports need to be printed and which don’t. Or even print the entire night audit to an e-file for paperless audit. Save lots of trees!
• Set up daily, weekly, or monthly rates. Revenue for weekly and monthly rates is automatically distributed evenly over the stay so management reporting is accurate.
• Add a catchy advertising line to your folio to attract guests for more business, or just to offer a friendly greeting. Print colour pr b&w logo on folios, letters, registration cards. Attractive and saves up to $2000 per year for large hotels, $500 per year for small hotels on forms.
• Turn on Auto-blocking, Auto-Juggling, and Auto-Bumping, or turn them off. Hotels that take mostly reservations use these features to increase occupancy and to make room selection much faster. The juggler can actually evaluate room combinations and increase the yield of the property automatically.

Reservations

• Designed for speed. Your focus is your guest, not the computer.
• Email a confirmation to a guest instantly! (Requires Microsoft Outlook.
• Easy review and edit of any reservation with speed search capability. Search reservation and guest file on any field in the file.
• Pull all guest data from guest history as you take a reservation. Get spelling right and all other information every time. You never need to bother your repeat customers with the information again. Automatically reuses address, phone, preferred room type, room number if available, smoking/non smoking, settlement, credit card information, corporate account.
• Quick availability and rate screen when you star a reservation. Before you start you know what’s available instantly, and exactly how much it will cost the guest, even with yield management in effect.
• Automatically charges weekday and changes to weekend rates. Both rates are displayed when you start a reservation. Can also be set to charge a different rate every day of a multi day stay.
• Powerful rate calculator for kids rates for resorts that cater to families. This feature is activated only if you need it, otherwise you don’t see it at all. Set up to 10 user defined age categories, set prices for each rate card, add discount rules. When you take a reservation Five Star asks for number of adults and kids in each age category, calculates the rate and surcharges and applies discounts for fully automatic resort pricing.
• Shows number of visits, v.i.p. status, # of no shows & cancellations, and total previous revenue when copying from history.
• Records and shows you history notes for special guest requirements for value added service opportunities. What do guests think when you remember they like extra pillows? They LOVE it!
• Automatically remembers the bad-list (people not welcome back). Make sure you don’t take that guest who damaged his room last time.
• As you take the reservation, pick the rooms yourself (called manual blocking) or let the computer find a room. Speeds reservations fast!
• Book multiple rooms with one reservation.
• Pop up all hotel, occupancy, guest, housekeeping and miscellaneous information on the screen as you take the reservation. Complete information at your fingertips when you need it.
• Pre-prints registration cards. Re-prints registration cards. Prints registration cards that were taken since the last time you printed them.
• Prints an end of day reservation log to review reservations made that day.
• For each guest you can see a complete log of changes made to the reservation.
• Five on-screen inquiries and 7 report buttons for availability and occupancy information. Pick the one you like best.
• With Windows your reservation screen is only a hot key away no matter what you are doing (even from other programs like Word, Excel, Word Perfect etc.
• Cancellations are automatically assigned a cancellation number and saved in history. Also records the date, time, operator and secretary’s name if the guest doesn’t call himself.
• Specify required confirmation letters or deposit letters for automatic printing by the night auditor.
• Pulls information from the brochure system if you get a callback for a reservation from someone you sent a brochure to. Saves you the time of retyping name and address.

Guest Check-in/Check-out

• Check-in guests with as little as 7 keystrokes! Walk-in a guest on the same screen, not a different one.
• Walk-in guests from the history file and you have all the guest information instantly.
• Integrated to credit card swiper, to fill in the name, address, credit card info and drivers license number. Reads both credit cards and driver’s licenses. Makes walk-ins incredibly simple and accurate.
• Your guest needs only to sign the computer preprinted registration card and in seconds he is on his way to his room.
• Walk-in process shows rates and availability just like when you take a reservation, all impacted by yield management.
• Exactly the same screen to use as reservations (in fact reservations, check-in, edit in house guest, check-out, and create additional account screens are all identical.) You learn one; you’ve learned them all!
• The computer finds clean vacant rooms automatically and assigns them. Can’t double occupy a room. Warns you of dirty rooms, but lets you continue if you know the housekeeper has just finished.
• Record charges or payments as you check-in for cash customers. When you check in a guest and settlement is needed, it shows you how much to collect.
• Express checkout feature saves line-ups in the morning. If you have the optional movie interface, express check out right from the tv.

Hotel Room Status and Lookups

• 5 ways to view room and hotel status, 7 reports, plus a report generator for your own style.
• Lookups are so fast they virtually eliminate the need for printing arrival lists, in-house lists etc. handle guest inquiries with instant on screen lookups over top of whatever else you are doing. Much faster than older systems!
• Over top of any program, pop up the availability screen, room status, guest account, guest messages, name search, search by reservation number, room number, room rates, room status, quick rate calculator, travel agent and corporate customer information.
• All look-ups feature speed search for instant find, and text search for lookups on any field in the file.
• Put rooms in/out of order for repairs and maintenance.
• Housekeeping features automatically set room status as dirty or clean.

Guest Charges

• Fast single one line per charge screen for recording all payments and non-room charges like meals, telephone, pay per view, services etc. and automatically applies taxes and surcharges. Simple easy to read screen facilitates swiveling the screen for review by your guest to confirm the account transactions and balance. Fix disputes on screen without reprinting the folio.
• Immediate review of the transaction with taxes etc. as you enter it, and shows effect on guest balance so you get it right before posting. Dramatically cuts errors and corrections.
• Special account functions include transferring all or selected charges from one account to another, creation of additional accounts, account sharing, checking to see if a guest has additional accounts, canceling a checkout.
• Powerful rate control includes seasonal rates, weekend rates, different rates for each day of a multi day stay, kids rates.
• Controls out of balance postings to the special folios like daily cash sales etc.
• Prints an end of shift report for balancing cash drawer for each manager, and for a list of activity for the shift.
• English & French folios.

City Ledger

• Prints direct bill invoices immediately for fastest A/R turnaround. Reprint a detailed bill from history instantly for as long as you keep folio history (2 gigabyte hard disk can accommodate 5 years!)
• Fully integrated to the city ledger in the Back Office module (optional), with automatic transfer of direct bill accounts to the city ledger. (Requires the Back Office module for tracking account receivable, statements, running letters etc.)
• Use the report generators to assess past and future booking patterns and value added by corporations. Target your market and increase your sales effectiveness.

Recording Sales in the Restaurant, Gift Shop, etc.

• Run all other sales, receipts etc. through the front office system so that the daily revenue report shows all activity for your property, not just rooms. This also simplifies your accounting and balancing, by using Five Star to compute the general ledger journal entry for the entire property. Use Five Star for your complete hotel management, not just room management. If you have the optional back office module, the journal entry for the whole property (not just rooms) gets done every night, so your financial statements are accurate on the revenue side EVERY DAY.

Night Audit

• Updates hotel status and reporting on no shows and stay-over,
• Today’s arrivals and departures list,
• Posts room charges, taxes, surcharges to guest folios & your files.
• Reports on direct billings & transfers direct bill balances to the Back Office module (optional module)
• Shows high account balances, and guest ledger balancing.
• Travel agent commission with transfer to the accounts payable ledger in the back office (optional) module,
• Complete detailed charges report, with summary totals for posting to general ledger.
• Daily revenue report for all hotel activities, with monthly and yearly comparison. Shows room charges, other charges, receipts by method of payment.
• Detailed daily/weekly or monthly/yearly statistics report with average daily rate, percentage occupancy, number of new reservations, cancellations, changes, check-ins, walk-ins, check-outs, no shows, stay-over, rooms available, out of order, occupied, vacant, number of complimentary rooms. The daily revenue and statistics reports summarize complete hotel management information on a few pages. Your most important daily report.
• Auto-juggler checks all auto-blocked reservations (your guest picked the room type, not a specific room number) and determines the optimum room assignment, freeing up longer blocks of available rooms. The easiest way to increase occupancy in a busy hotel.
• Transfers checked-out guests to history, transfers folios to history, and checks the integrity of data files.
• Integrates general ledger details to Quickbooks, Accpac, Simply Accounting, and others.

Housekeeping

• Instant room status review and update.
• Housekeeping report for the maids show clean or dirty, occupied or vacant, when guests are checking in, when they are checking out, who is staying over, and which rooms are out of order. Gives housekeeping a place for notes too.

History and Marketing

• Retain every folio and every guest detail for instant access.
• Copy from guest history for new reservations and repeat guest walk-ins.
• View guest history right on-line.

Built In Reports

• End of shift report
• In-house list
• House status report (everything you need to run your property on one page in the event of a power failure or computer hardware breakdown.
• Today's room inventory
• Expected arrivals
• Expected departures
• Availability report
• Availability forecast
• Rooms booked analysis
• Group Sales Forecast
• Room Availability Reconciliation report
• Occupancy Forecast
• Market Segment Analysis for past and future
• Guest charges report
• End of day reservations log
• Housekeeping report
• Guest Ledger & High Balances
• Post Room Charges
• Total Charges for the day and General Ledger posting
• Daily Revenue and Statistics report
• Direct Bill (Accounts Receivable) report
• Reports on all master files, with user defined option for selected fields, sorting and selection filter.
• Reports as shown above from night audit.
• All night audit reports may be previewed to check accuracy before running the actual night audit.

Hot Keys and Tool Bar

• Use the Bookmark button on the toolbar to make a list of the programs you need to use over top of any other program. Creates the ultimate in fast and easy use. For example, pop up the reservation screen with 2 clicks of the mouse over any other program.
• F5 key shows room availability by room type and by date. -
• F6 key shows room use/blocks with zoom-in features.
• F7 global key shows guest account balance, reservation and guest name search, lookup by room number and reservation number, account settlement methods, room status lookup by room number, rack rate information, calculate daily charge, room types, rate types, travel agents, corporate customers.
• Task Scheduler displays your day timer and reminders right on the main screen always. Used for managing reminder tasks and emails.

Additional Features Found in the Five Star Full Version (not available in Five Star Lite)

Hotel Setup & General Features

• Set up package plans for multi day and multi component. Revenues are automatically split for departmental financial reporting with up to 40 components.
• Create your own custom fields to collect ANY information you want to about guests. This feature adds HUGE flexibility for specialty properties that offer other services, like theater tickets, boat rentals, paid parking spaces, special occasion, vehicle plate number, kids names, gold club member etc up to 40 extra fields with mandatory flag, and lookup lists.
• Create user-defined letters and registration cards, welcome letters, brochure letters, right in the system. Easier and faster than mail merge (see also our mail merge feature too.)
• Asks the ‘where did you hear of us’ question, the single most important feature in Five Star. If you pay $5,000 or more per year for advertising and franchise fees, this feature can save you the price of the software many time each year, or help generate thousands of dollars in additional revenues, by fine tuning your promotion dollars.
• Waiting List
• When you have to turn away a guest you can record the reason and report on this data statistically. Helps you learn which opportunities are most frequently lost, and how to keep them in the future.

Yield Management Module

• Automatically adjusts the rate for busy dates you specify and for any date when occupancy is high. Suppose your property generates $1 million room revenue per year, with 70% annual occupancy. So roughly 30% of the time you are high occupancy, when you raise rates 30%, e.g. from $69.95 to $99.95. If staff forgets to raise the rates just 20% of the times they are supposed to, this feature saves you $18,000 per year!
• Offers seasonal rates, lock out rates by season.
• Percentage occupancy rate increases with 8 tiers of increments. This induces guests to book early, just like an airline.
• Lock out specific dates and set minimum stays, like weekend bookings must include Friday and Saturday, and no arrivals are permitted on Saturday.
• Offers daily rate increases where you specify the dates rates should increase.
• Saves any property thousands of dollars each year.
• Send detailed messages to reservationists on any date reminding them of special events, up-sell opportunities etc.

Group Module

• Full group management system with excellent booking flexibility.
• Copy frequent tours or groups from master templates for quick setup.
• Book different number of rooms for the group on each night. Easy to come back and change the room blocks after.
• Fast assign names to rooms screen looks just like a rooming list. Group guests can arrive days early, leave later, and can be changed any time.
• Automatically creates sharer folios as required. Set up to 4 guests per room right in the rooming list screen.
• Wedding style bookings where guests phone in and book independently also accommodated.
• Quick release rooms after all names assigned, puts rooms not used back into inventory so they are no longer blocked.
• Prints group summary reports for long range planning, group sales forecast for detailed revenue and booking analysis, rooming list cutoff report for rooming lists you should have received, deposit cut off report, rooming list for day of arrival
• Master folio always created for group charges, plus incidentals folios created automatically for every guest.
• Report generators offer report design features specifically for group business.
• Instant Check In feature puts 100’s of reservations in house in seconds.
• Instant Check Out feature.
• Transfer charges lets you quickly move all or specific charges between folios in seconds.
• View group blocks tentative and confirmed on the room inventory screens.
• Print long group folios in summary, but still retain all the detail.

Built-In Report Generators

• Three built in report generators for reservation information, market analysis, and guest history. Access to over 150 fields of information in the data files, with the ability to sort and select records based on just about anything in the files.
• Design your own reports with just what you need and nothing that you don't.
• Use guest name, address and market source information taken from the brochure system for further market analysis, doubling its accuracy.
• Design any reports from the reservation file for things like special guest requests for maids, revenue projections, corporate and travel agent and group projections, etc.
• Output guest history to a word processor mail merge file for selected group mailings.
• Design and print your own guest history reports for information the way you need it. Some examples pre-designed and shipped with Five Star include revenue and occupancy by corporation, travel agent or group, revenue and occupancy by market source, rate and room type, special guest requests.

Travel Agent Module

• Set up all your travel agents and pay them immediately, with no time consuming paperwork at all. The easiest way to increase your occupancy. Five Star also comes pre-shipped with 2500 travel agents.
• Record travel agent commissions in an instant.
• Transfer automatically to accounts payable ledger (if you have the Back Office module) via the night audit or get a list of commissions every night audit.
• Calculates commissions automatically. This is the easiest way to increase your occupancy - pay your travel agents right away.
• Five Star comes pre-shipped with 2500 Canadian travel agents names and addresses and phone numbers. Use the mail merge capability to easily advertise your commissions to them and watch your occupancy soar!
• Use the report generators to assess past and future booking patterns and value added by travel agents. Excellent opportunity to improve your targeted marketing efforts.