Free tool · Your current system
How many hours a year does your current system ask of you?
The subscription your current system charges is a number you negotiate once and then forget. The hours are the ones you pay again every season: the ramp for each new hire, the questions they interrupt you with, the evening spent working out why a folio is wrong. That number never appears on a quote, and unlike the invoice it is set by design rather than by contract, which makes it the one worth choosing for.
Your year on the system you run today
Getting people working
Keeping it running
What an hour is worth here
The invoice, for comparison
108 h
a year, spent on the software rather than in it
That is 2.7 work weeks, and it is worth more than the subscription you negotiated. The useful part: unlike the invoice, this number is not fixed by a contract. It is set by how the software is designed, so it moves when the software does.
- Training ramp (6 people x 14h)
- 84 h
- Your hours answering questions
- 20 h
- Fixing the books (10 x 25m)
- 4.2 h
- Hours a year, spent on the software
- 108 h
- Which is roughly
- 2.7 work weeks
- Those hours at the wages you entered
- $2,526
- Subscription, for scale ($180 x 12)
- $2,160
Every hour here is your current system's. What the same week looks like on Cardinal is worth measuring on your own numbers in a demo, which is the only place that figure means anything.
This is a buying tool rather than a product screen: the arithmetic behind a decision, not a calculation Cardinal runs. Every number in it is yours.
Three ways to spend this number well
Make every vendor quote you the ramp, then verify it.
Ask how long before a new hire checks somebody in alone. If the answer is a training programme rather than a number of hours, that is a product that bills you every season. Then test it: hand the keyboard to somebody who has never seen the software and give them one guest to check in.
How we answer it. Cardinal derives the day's work from the state of the property and shows that, instead of presenting a complete map of everything the software can do. Less to learn, because less is on offer at any one moment. Run the keyboard test on us too, and on the same terms.
Ask where the day's work comes from.
If somebody assembles the morning list, that somebody is you, every day, and those hours belong in the box above.
How we answer it. The Control Deck is a task queue derived from arrivals, departures, balances and room states, and it changes when the property does. A whole day of it, in screenshots.
Treat the fixes as a signal, not a chore.
Ask what stops somebody doing the wrong thing: checking into an occupied room, taking the same payment twice, editing a posted transaction. The answer tells you how much supervision the software expects from you.
How we answer it. Postings are immutable, corrections are authorized reversals with a reason and an author, and occupancy and dirty-room guards sit in front of the actions that cause most of these.
One email when the next one is ready
We publish a tool or a guide every few weeks, all of it about Canadian small-property operations. One email each time it happens, and that is the whole of it.
The reasoning behind this tool is written out in full: Why training is the number that matters.
See it running
Watch a day run before you talk to anyone.
Six real screens from a working property, in the order the day happens. Open it now and go at your own pace.