A day at a homestay in INDRA

A four-room homestay in the hills. Before anyone is up, the Front desk checker looks at the day: arrivals with no room yet, guests past check-out still in house, rooms dirty for more than a day, and a missing night audit.

It posts one note to the team’s front-desk chat room. It is a plain rules helper with no AI, so it runs on both plans.

Anjali writes from your website: a room for two, 20 to 22 November. First INDRA works out the facts in code: which room types are free every night and fit two adults, at what rate.

On both plans, the Booking hold drafter, a rule with no AI, drafts a tentative hold on a free room of the type asked for. On the AI plan, the Booking reply drafter also writes a reply from those facts only. Both wait for you. Without AI, you write the reply yourself.

INDRA posts both drafts in the front-desk room, which runs on Matrix, an open chat network. Whoever is on duty replies approve 87 and the hold is made, with a receipt naming them.

In the front-desk room, any other line is taken as a question for INDRA. Guests don’t use this room: it is for your team.

Noon. Kabir arrives for the Garden cottage, room 104. The last guest left it dirty, so INDRA refuses the check-in and says why.

Housekeeping finishes and types room 104 clean in the room. Or tap the room on the board. Then try again.

For the guest register, INDRA asks for the ID type and number. It keeps only the last four characters of the number, never the whole thing.

Type a made-up number and see what would be stored.

Kabir orders dinner. Post it to his folio, the running bill for his stay. Food served in a hotel or homestay has its own GST rule.

Nothing is billed yet. At check-out INDRA turns the folio into one GST invoice, with each line taxed by its rule.

At the end of the day you run the night audit from the front desk: one room night is posted to every in-house guest’s folio, and their rooms are put down for cleaning tomorrow. Forget it, and tomorrow’s morning check drafts it for you.

Each room night gets its GST slab from your tax rules. INDRA’s defaults: 5% up to ₹7,500 a night, 18% above. Like every default rate, they are marked “confirm with your CA”. Slide the cottage rate across ₹7,500.

The Home screen shows the day in three numbers: arrivals still to come, rooms occupied tonight, and rooms to clean, each with the real count beside it.

And everything that happened today left a signed receipt: the morning note, the approval, the room status, the check-in, the dinner, the audit.