Direct answers about how it actually works

Enter your property address and the province, tax table and timezone configure themselves. Then add your room types and rates. A single-rate property is fully operational after the rooms section. Rate plans and bulk rate tools are optional and labelled as such.

The system generates the day's work and walks staff through it one guest at a time, so the first shift is productive. There is contextual guidance on every field a first-timer would not know, and the software surfaces its own capabilities as staff encounter them rather than requiring a training manual.

Every field a first-timer cannot be expected to know carries a small (i), right beside the field, with a plain-language note: what a lodging tax applies to, what a minimum stay does to a rate, what a scheduling model is for an activity. The note is written for somebody who has never run a property, and it is the same voice in configuration, at the folio and in the manager's reports.

Yes, and it is in the price rather than a line on an onboarding order. Guests and reservations come across by CSV, and we do the first pass with you on a call using your real rooms and rates. The same door works outward: CSV exports and a full JSON backup of everything, self-serve, whenever you want them.

Either way works. Cardinal Payments runs cards through Stripe and posts them straight to the folio, and a hosted link lets the guest pay on their own device. If you already have a terminal, keep it: what you take on it, in cash, by cheque or by Interac debit is recorded on the same folio. Card details are never typed into Cardinal.

Yes. Accommodation types are unlimited and arbitrary: sites, RV pads, cabins, yurts, rooms. Nothing in the system assumes a hotel corridor.

No. Divisions let one property hold a hotel wing and a campground side by side, filtered independently on the board but sharing one guest database, one ledger and one set of books.

Yes, as a first-class part of the system rather than an add-on. Three scheduling models cover most of what small properties sell: inventory (canoes, bikes), time slots (a guided hike at 9 and 2), and hourly (a kayak by the hour). Activities booked for an in-house guest go on their room folio and settle at check-out.

It works, and the optional sections stay collapsed. The cost of a small property using Cardinal is not paying for complexity it does not touch.

No, and that is deliberate. Posted transactions are immutable at the database level. To correct one you post a reversal, which requires a manager authorization and a stated reason, and both are written into the ledger. This is what makes the books auditable.

Every mistake is fixable. Voids, discounts, refunds and manager-authorized reversals all exist. The difference is that fixing it leaves a trail instead of erasing the evidence.

All of them, all 13 provinces and territories, with the correct combination for each, and stored as separate components on every transaction, so the remittance report is a query rather than a reconstruction.

Applied to accommodation only, never to goods or activities. You set your rate. Quebec's intermediary rule is modelled: agency bookings carry the flat per-night amount remitted by the agency, platform bookings are remitted by the platform, and the remittance report splits the accommodation tax by who actually remits it.

Yes. Close the period and it is locked. A transaction dated into a closed period is not rejected and is not lost. It is redated into the current period, with its original date kept on the record.

A detailed transaction export with tax split by component, an accountant summary, a GST/QST remittance report, a payment reconciliation, and a monthly archive that keeps all four for every completed month. GL codes are configurable and mapped at export.

No, and there is nothing here for one to do. A night audit exists in legacy systems because the books are only correct after a batch process rolls the day. In Cardinal every transaction posts as it happens and the ledger is always current. Instead of a nightly close there is an automatic sweep that resolves no-shows and overdue check-outs, and a completeness reconciliation that runs before you read any report.

One payment is recorded. Posting runs in a single database transaction that locks that one folio while it writes, and every payment carries a one-time key, so the same submission arriving twice is recognised as the same payment rather than counted twice. Six simultaneous submissions of the same $50 produce one posting. This is a test we run, not an assumption.

Yes. Charges group automatically into lodging, activities and products, and other. Each group can settle on its own method. One reservation, two settlements, one screen.

Yes. The whole charge or part of it, to any in-house guest, with an undo.

The reservation is flagged as a missed arrival with its own colour and its own actions. If they are a day late, the action is check in late. Beyond that it is update arrival date and check in, or cancel, with cancellation-fee guidance. If nothing resolves it, the system auto-cancels after a 24 hour grace period and reverses the charges in the ledger.

They are auto-checked-out after the same grace period, with the balance left exactly as it stands.

It is already blocked. The system names the guest who has to be checked out first and links straight to their reservation.

Yes. Checking a guest into a room that has not been cleaned since the last guest raises a warning you can override. A quick tidy for an early arrival is legitimate, an accident is not. Rooms marked dirty stay dirty until someone cleans them, including overnight.

Yes, and they see each other's work. A check-out on one computer updates the other without a refresh. With more than one person on the desk that is a correctness requirement, not a convenience.

The least-used available room in the category, so wear spreads evenly instead of always filling the same unit. The tally is visible and you can reset it. You can always pick the room yourself.

Held back from ordinary rotation so they are available for guests who need one, and given to any guest who declares the need. It is a preference, not a hard block. If it is the only room free it is still sold, because refusing a booking over a need nobody declared is the worse failure.

Your open nights next week are usually scattered: one night free in one unit, two in another, none of them long enough for anyone to book. Optimize week moves bookings between units of the same category so those loose nights collect together and whole units come free for three and four nights in a row. Guests keep the rate they booked and only the unit changes, and it never moves a guest already in house, a guest who asked for a specific unit, or a locked unit. Before you apply it, it shows what it does to the shape of your open nights. If it would free nothing and improve nothing, it says so instead of moving guests for the sake of it.

Rooms are prioritized by what is actually happening: turnovers, then arrivals, then departures, then stayovers, then vacants. Staffing is forecast from cleaning time and productive hours per shift, with a seven-day outlook, and there is a printable daily report.

Yes. Date windows, seasons, minimum stay, daily, weekly or monthly cadence, restricted to a company account, or unlocked by a rate code.

No. Rate plans follow the base rate. Set a corporate rate at -15% and raising your base carries through automatically. You can also price any individual room on its own without leaving its group.

No. An automatically applied rate can never cost more than the rate the guest would otherwise pay. The cheapest qualifying plan wins, the base rate is always in the running, and a seasonal surcharge is offered as a choice rather than applied silently.

Three ways, and you choose per item: charge it as its own line, blend it into the nightly price so the guest sees one all-in rate, or comp it. Blended keeps the accounting correct, because the lodging tax is still computed on the lodging portion only.

That is one of the four pricing bases: per stay, per night, per person, per person-night. Breakfast for two over three nights bills six, correctly, with no arithmetic at the desk. You can also choose which day a package starts, so added on day two of a four-night stay it bills two mornings.

The guest service report: every guest on property that day, their services, that day's activities with times, and a printable sheet with a signature column.

Yes. Hosted, no login for the guest, mobile-friendly, showing your photos, description, amenities and policy. It prices through the same rate engine the desk uses and writes a real reservation. Commission-free.

Yes, on the same page as the stay.

Availability travels both ways today. Each room publishes a calendar feed that Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com subscribe to, so dates you close here stop being sold there, and Cardinal reads their feeds back every hour and closes the nights they have sold. The feeds carry dates and nothing else. Underneath you map room types and set per-channel rate offsets, ready for the certified link. The certified two-way link, which pushes rates and returns a channel booking as a reservation, is blocked on a partner contract rather than on code. Ask us to add you to the notification list for a specific channel.

Yes, and it is modelled properly. Who collects the guest's money is a per-channel setting, because it changes everything: a hotel-collect channel invoices you commission monthly, while a merchant-model channel charges the guest, keeps its cut and remits net. Conflating those either chases a guest for money they already paid or zeroes a folio the guest genuinely owes.

You type them in plain language. Each one is matched against the list the booking sites recognise: what matches gets a French label and an icon for free and is ready for the channels' own lists, what does not is labelled as showing on your booking page only. That is why you do not fill in a 200 item checklist here. If something you typed at property level is really a room fact, a fireplace say, the screen says so and offers to move it onto the room types that have it.

In Canada. Relevant to PIPEDA and to Quebec's Law 25.

Each property's records are readable only by that property. That boundary is enforced by the database itself rather than by the software in front of it, so it holds even when a screen gets something wrong.

Daily, with each month's first backup retained permanently, toward CRA's six year records requirement.

The guest booking page is fully French, and a francophone guest gets it from their own browser without choosing anything. On the staff side, the reservation board for rooms and activities, the Control Deck, Housekeeping and the navigation are French today, and the folio, the booking wizards, the settings and the manager reports are being translated now. The two sides are gated on purpose in opposite directions: your guests are offered French only once a whole surface is French, and your staff get the toggle now with anything not yet reached showing in English. The language is remembered against the staff member rather than the browser, so a shared desk does not hand the next shift the last one's choice.

The desk experience is built for a desk, and the mobile experience is actively improving. The guest-facing booking page is built mobile-first.

Because it loads once. Cardinal is a single application: moving from the calendar to a folio to housekeeping to a report changes what is on screen rather than fetching a new page, so there is no sign-in again and no wait between steps. Older systems in this category are built a page at a time, which is the architecture an operator is describing when they say their system is slow. It shows up hardest on a rural connection.

Roughly forty dedicated automated test suites cover the money paths: tax arithmetic, folio math, ledger reconciliation, refunds, rates, packages, concurrency. Several thousand assertions run in multiple timezones on every change. Beyond that, the system reconciles the entire property against the ledger before any report is exported and flags anything it cannot verify.