Hotel ERP and Energy Monitoring That Put Rooms, Outlets and Maintenance in One View

The Challenge

The resort runs its rooms alongside several restaurants and bars, a spa and event spaces. Each outlet closed its day on its own point-of-sale terminals, and rooms revenue lived in the property management system. Finance stitched the pieces together in spreadsheets, so the owners saw a combined picture of rooms and outlets only after month-end, and nobody could say with confidence which outlets were carrying the others.

Housekeeping and maintenance ran on paper, as they still do in much of hospitality. A guest's complaint about a dripping tap or a noisy air-conditioning unit was written in a logbook at the front desk, carried to engineering and closed when somebody remembered to tick it. Recurring faults in the same rooms went unnoticed, because their history sat in old logbooks.

Energy was a major cost that nobody could see in detail. One utility bill arrived for the whole property, chillers and lighting ran on fixed schedules, and there was no way to tell a floor that was using more than it should from one that was simply full.

• Rooms and outlet revenue reported separately and combined by hand
• Daily cash and card takings reconciled outlet by outlet in spreadsheets
• Housekeeping and maintenance requests on paper, with no history per room
• Energy known only as a single bill, with no view per floor or per asset

Our Approach

Discovery covered finance, the front office, housekeeping, engineering and every outlet manager. We followed a trading day from the outlet terminals to the bank, traced a maintenance request from the guest to the technician and back, and walked the plant rooms and risers with the engineering team to see which meters were already installed.

The fit-gap review showed that StarBiz covered finance, cost centers, point-of-sale integration, procurement and maintenance requests through configuration. The integrations needed the most care: the outlet terminals, connected through an adapter, and a scheduled file exchange that brings the daily rooms revenue summary from the property management system into StarBiz. On the energy side, the StarSense site survey found that many existing meters could be read through gateways, so new sub-meters were needed only where floors or plant had none.

We agreed a phased plan. Finance and outlet integration came first, with a chart of accounts and a cost center for the rooms division and for each outlet. Housekeeping and maintenance requests followed, then a StarSense pilot on the floors and plant with the highest consumption before scaling out across the property. Opening balances and supplier records were cleaned and migrated, each integration was tested against real trading days, and training was delivered by role to finance, outlet managers, housekeeping supervisors and technicians.

The Solution

Rooms and Outlets in One Finance View

The rooms division and each outlet are cost centers in StarBiz. The point-of-sale integration brings every outlet's sales and payments in automatically, and the rooms revenue summary arrives through the scheduled file exchange. Daily cash and card takings are reconciled in one place, bank statement lines are paired with open items, and any difference can be traced to the outlet and the trading day it came from. Purchase requests from the kitchens, bars, spa and engineering follow approval rules and are charged to the cost center that raised them, so outlet managers see their spending against budget during the month instead of after it. The live dashboard shows rooms and every outlet side by side, with budget against actual for each cost center and statements exported to PDF and XLSX for the owners.

Housekeeping and Maintenance off Paper

Front desk staff, housekeeping supervisors and technicians raise and update requests in StarBiz from a phone or tablet. Each request records the room or area, the type of request and its priority, and stays with a named person until the work is closed. The history for each room and asset now shows recurring faults, and once StarSense was reading the plant, run-hour counters on chillers and pumps began to prompt servicing based on actual use rather than memory.

Energy per Floor with StarSense

StarSense gateways read the existing meters and the new sub-meters on each floor and in the main plant, and every reading appears on live dashboards per floor and per asset, with floor-plan views that place readings where the equipment sits. Baseline models account for occupancy and weather, so the engineering team sees when a floor drifts from its expected profile instead of waiting for the bill. Alerts arrive by email and in-app notification, and when an alert points to equipment, such as a chiller or a pump running outside its normal pattern, StarSense raises a maintenance work order in StarBiz automatically. New lighting and air-conditioning schedules for back-of-house areas ran in dry-run mode before any rule was allowed to act.

The Results

• Owners and finance see rooms and every outlet side by side on one live dashboard, with budget against actual per outlet, instead of waiting for month-end spreadsheets.
• Daily cash and card takings from every outlet are reconciled in one place, instead of outlet by outlet in separate spreadsheets.
• Housekeeping and maintenance requests are tracked from report to completion, and the history per room and asset exposes recurring faults.
• Engineering sees energy use floor by floor and asset by asset, and investigates drifts from the baseline before the utility bill arrives.
• Equipment alerts from StarSense become maintenance work orders in StarBiz without anyone re-keying them.
• Purchases from the kitchens, bars, spa and engineering are approved in StarBiz and charged to the right cost center, so budget against actual stays current.

Lessons for Similar Projects

1. Give the rooms division and every outlet its own cost center from the start; splitting a combined ledger later is far harder.
2. Survey before you buy hardware. Existing meters can often be read through gateways, so only the gaps need new sub-meters.
3. Move maintenance off paper before adding sensors, so alerts land in a workflow that technicians already use.
4. Run automation rules in dry-run mode first. Seeing what a rule would have done builds the confidence to let it act.