Housekeeping gets its own module
Housekeeping has been in Gurita for years, in the sense that a room could be marked dirty or clean. That was it — one flag on the room record, on a tab of the Occupancy planner. Everything around it lived somewhere else: who cleans what, in which order, how long it should take, and whether anyone actually checked afterwards. Usually a printed list and a WhatsApp group.
This release makes Housekeeping a module of its own, with a proper unit of work behind it: the task. A room isn't dirty or clean any more — it has services scheduled for today, each with an owner, a state, and a history.
The board
The board is the day. Every room, grouped by room type on a resort and by deck on a vessel, with five counts across the top: to clean, in progress, clean, inspected, issues.
Clean and inspected are deliberately two different things, and this is the part worth arguing about internally before you roll it out. Clean means the maid says she's done. Inspected means somebody looked. Plenty of properties don't inspect at all, and for those you switch inspection off and a finished room goes straight to inspected — but if you do inspect, you now have the number, and the number tends to be interesting in the first week.
Each row ends in a single button, and it always shows the one next step for that room: Start, then Finish, then Inspect. Not a menu of nine possible actions, seven of which are invalid right now. One button, the right one.
Above the table, an amber banner appears when a room has an arrival due and nobody assigned, with the time of the first arrival in it. It's advisory — it won't stop anything — but it's the line that gets read first at eight in the morning.
Service plans, not a checklist you retype
The work comes from service plans: departure clean, turndown, deep clean, linen change, whatever your property calls them. Each plan has a trigger that decides which rooms get it on which day: checkout, before check-in, arrival day, daily for occupied rooms, every N nights of a stay, a fixed time of day, after N vacant days, after maintenance — or manual, meaning it only ever appears when somebody adds it. Each carries its own checklist, its standard minutes, and its credit weight.
Credits are the bit that makes the roster arithmetic work. A departure clean in a suite is not the same job as a turndown in a standard room, and counting rooms-per-maid pretends it is. Set a credit factor per room type and the weekly plan starts telling you something true about workload.
Assignment that knows who's actually working
Auto-assign offers four strategies — arrivals first, even workload, same as yesterday, or by section — and it reads who is on shift from the Shift Plan rather than from a list of employees who exist in principle. Somebody on leave doesn't get rooms.
It also shows you a preview before it writes anything: who gets what, how the credits land, and what it couldn't place. If the roster is empty for that day, it says so plainly instead of silently assigning nobody.
The maid's phone
Maids get a different app, not a smaller version of yours. One screen, their day, their credits, one room at a time: the checklist, a photo where a photo is required, the minibar, and one big button that matches whatever step the room is on.
Minibar entry is absolute, not a delta — you type what the guest drank, not what you restocked. That sounds obvious right up until you've seen the alternative billed to a guest. The par level is shown next to each product for reference and is never what gets charged.
If the connection drops halfway through a room, the phone retries and a repeated tick is simply a no-op. Finishing a room on bad WiFi should not produce a support ticket.
The paper trail, and the paper
Two things came out of watching this run on a real property.
The first is the room's timeline: started, finished, inspected, paused with a reason, issue reported, and — the one that matters — entered despite Do not disturb. Gurita warns on DND, it doesn't lock; a maid with a schedule to keep will go in, and pretending otherwise just moves the problem off-system. So the entry is recorded with who and when. When a guest complains three days later that someone came into their room before nine, there is an answer.
The second is paper. There is a Maid sheet button on the board that prints the day as a PDF: totals at the top, then one block per room with its services, assignees, times, credits, and an empty Done column. Digital-first is a design principle, not a religion, and the morning briefing still happens around a table with a printed sheet on it. There is also a CSV export of the same day, one row per service, for anyone who wants to build their own numbers in a spreadsheet.
Rolling it out
The module is off by default and switched on per property. Until an administrator turns on Use new housekeeping board, nothing changes and the old Housekeeping tab under Occupancy stays exactly where it is. The permissions are separate too, and none of them are granted automatically — including the maid-only one, which deliberately gives access to a maid's own tasks and nothing else.
The full walkthrough is in the Housekeeping documentation: the board, a room's detail page, the weekly plan, automatic assignment, the maid view, and settings.