Running a hotel without spreadsheets: replace your Excel lists in 30 days

Where Excel and paper notes hide today

A typical setup is a booking chart with one row per room and one column per day, colour-coded by guest or OTA. Alongside it there is a room list printed for housekeeping every morning, a guest list with addresses for registration and regulars, a list of deposits, a tourist tax sheet for the municipality and, at month end, a revenue list for the owner and the accountant.

Each of these lists has a purpose, and each was created out of a real need. The problem isn’t Excel; it is that the same booking appears in four files and every change has to be updated by hand in four places.

The risks of Excel in day-to-day hotel operations

The first risk is versions. If the booking chart lives on the front desk computer, there is soon a copy in the back office, one on the owner’s laptop and a printout from this morning. Which one is right? On a quiet Tuesday you can find out. On a Saturday evening with three arrivals and a call from Booking.com, you can’t.

The second risk is errors nobody checks. Excel doesn’t warn you when a room is entered twice for the same night, when a departure is a day too early or when a formula shifts as you insert a row. Hotel software rejects a booking for an occupied room before the guest receives a confirmation.

The third risk concerns guest data. Names, addresses, dates of birth and sometimes ID numbers in a file that is emailed around or carried on a USB stick sit uneasily with the GDPR’s requirements for access control and deletion. In software with individual logins and permissions, you can trace who sees which data. The fourth risk is dependence: often only one person knows the colour codes, abbreviations and special rules. If they are away, the hotel grinds to a halt.

What to replace first

The booking chart comes first, because that is where double bookings happen. As soon as all bookings, including phone and walk-in, are in one place, the biggest risk is gone. If you sell through OTAs, connecting them via a channel manager belongs in this step too.

Housekeeping and guest data come second, because they depend directly on occupancy. The morning room list is then generated from arrivals and departures, and the guest database grows with every booking without anyone retyping addresses. Deposits, tourist tax and revenue lists come third. They benefit most once the first two steps are in place, because then every figure comes from real bookings.

The 30-day plan

Thirty days are enough for a small property if you break the switch into weeks and give each week a clear goal. What matters is a fixed cut-over date after which the Excel booking chart is no longer changed. Until then, both can exist side by side; afterwards there is only one source of truth.

Which reports and exports still make sense

Without Excel doesn’t mean without spreadsheets. For your own analysis, talks with the bank or a year-on-year comparison, a spreadsheet is often exactly right. The difference: the data is no longer maintained in Excel but exported from the software when needed. That way you always work with the current figures and never with a copy from last week.

Three kinds of export remain especially useful: booking lists for a period, for example to analyse sources or length of stay yourself; reports on occupancy, average rate and revenue for owners and the bank; and the package for your accountant in the format their firm works with. Everything else that is produced today as a monthly list should be something the software can display itself.

How STRYK handles it

In STRYK the tape chart replaces the Excel spreadsheet: daily, weekly, two-week and monthly views, drag-and-drop to move bookings, walk-ins and multi-room bookings created directly. New bookings, including those from OTAs, appear without reloading. Before every save, STRYK checks whether the room type is still free for every night, so a room is never promised twice. Connect Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and other channels to STRYK. Manage rates and availability centrally and handle OTA reservations in the calendar.

The housekeeping schedule is generated daily from actual occupancy, with room statuses such as dirty, clean and inspected, assignment to staff members and a PDF schedule that STRYK can email every day if you wish. Guest data goes into the guest profiles, registration data comes from online check-in; for Austria, STRYK monitors the registration deadline and creates the export for the registration system. Deposits are handled through online payment and are attached to the booking. STRYK calculates tourist tax per booking, including age bands and exemptions, and shows it on the invoice.

For analysis, STRYK offers reports as PDF, XLSX and CSV, booking lists can be exported as CSV or XLSX, and for your accountant there are exports including DATEV and BMD format. You bring over your existing Excel lists through the data import with column mapping and a test run. Everyone works with their own login and suitable permissions, there is no limit on the number of users, and the activity log shows who changed what. STRYK costs a €59 base fee plus €6 per room per month, excl. VAT and billed annually, with no set-up fee; you can try it free for 14 days.