The Nova Hotel Booking System

By Whitestar Software Inc.

The editors of these documents were: Melanie Brake, Clinton Work, Bill Browning, and Remo Jin


This document is concise and well written. For the most part, it well reporesents the requirements of Hotel 451. Any changes that are required are marked directly on the page with the symbol.

The major sections:
What is Nova Hotel Booking System?

Nova Hotel Booking System is an information system designed specifically to meet the needs of Hotel 451. It is crafted to handle most of the day to day operations from several terminals distributed at certain locations within the hotel. The Nova Hotel Booking System is the ultimate in information technology. This system will not only provide faster and better customer service performance, but also a new standard of employee efficiency. The system is designed to be used by all employees involved in Hotel 451. From the room service staff to the front desk staff to the accountants, all will feel at home on the easy to use interface and powerful database.

As mentioned above, there are basically four categories of employees who will use the system:

Each will have access to relevant information and support functions pertaining to their daily operations, narrowing the focus of the system for more efficient use. This also allows each individual section security from alteration by the staff of the other two, whether malicious or inadvertent. In addition, the management staff will have access to all the sections allowing emergency use of the entire system.

The Front Desk Personnel have a heavy emphasis placed on customer interaction. To better service this need, the Nova Hotel Booking System interface will be very quick to navigate, and data entry simple and straight forward. Basic functions such as reservation of rooms, customer entry into the system database, current guest list, and the handling of invoices will be simple to access. Despite the fact that a large volume of data is being manipulated the emphasis will be placed on the speed of the response to the employees' queries, not on optimizations of space and speed. We feel that timely response to customers the paramount concern of any user of our hotel management system. A big part of front desk service is the preparation of invoices for customers. Since our customer group already has systems in place to keep track of phone calls and food items we will concentrate on allowing the front desk personnel to quickly integrate totals from these tracking systems into our system.

The Accounting system's main concern is with the meticulous tracking of Hotel 451's customer accounts. To support these activities we intend to include features such as customer invoicing, payment tracking, and quarterly reports. The system will also allow the accountants to review the hotel's income, and spot trends in income over any time period with a set of flexible income summary and trending reports. Another item of note concerning the accounting subsystem is that the invoice data is stored within the system for 7 years, as required by provincial accounting and tax laws.

The Room Service Staff are in charge of wake-up calls, food orders and services in general for each room. Thus, the Nova Hotel Booking System tracks the orders for each room, making sure that the requested service is delivered on time. A wake-up service is provided by The system will be designed to print out a list of wake-up calls each morning to assist the staff in the task of calling the right rooms at the right times. In addition the cleaning staff will appreciate their printed schedule detailing which rooms require cleaning on any given day.

The Management Staff have essentially the same access as all other users combined. They also have the ability to add, delete and modify employee information in the database. In essence we see the management staff as the "super users" of our system. This will allow complete autonomous administration of the hotel management system after installation

Since the class of managers has been introduced, there is now a need for multiple layers of access. For example, a front desk clerk may not access employee information. The classification of restricted management access is further broken down in the Management Functions section.

Because the Nova Hotel Booking System is designed to be used by all staff with varying degrees of computer experience, the Nova Hotel Booking System will be designed to be simple enough for a novice to use, but will include the functionality that an expert expects. Furthermore, the system should be cost effective to design and to install on site. For these reasons, and several others our group has elected to use Access, running under Windows 95, supported with a TCP/IP network to allow all user to simultaneously access the software. The system will be run from several terminals, placed within Hotel 451 at the management staff's discretion. These terminals will be linked to a main file server giving each terminal access to the full database, while giving the entire system room to expand.


Kent Choy is the contributor to this section.

Functional Specification


Links to the following documents:


Brian Hoang, Remo Jin, Eddy Liu, Fan Feng, Loan Nguyen, Raul Olivo are the contributors to this section.

Management Plan


Links to the following documents: