You never signed up to be the IT department

Hospitality management software runs the operational side of a venue. Bookings, room allocation, table plans, the till, payments, stock and reporting.

Most venues end up running several of them at once. A booking system for rooms, a different one for tables, a till behind the bar, a spa diary, a payment provider on top. Each does its own job. None of them talk to each other, so somebody re-types everything.

The alternative is one system covering all of it off a single database. A drink rung up at the bar goes onto the room bill without anyone typing it twice, and availability is the same number everywhere.

Alacer is the second kind. Sixteen modules, one database, and you switch on the ones you need.

If you've got an IT department, probably yes. Specialists are specialists.

If you haven't, you're the integration. Four suppliers, four contracts, four renewal dates, and when a booking doesn't reach the till on a Saturday night, four companies each telling you it's one of the others.

The question isn't which module is best. It's what the joins cost you, and who's holding them together at eight o'clock on a Saturday. In most independent venues that's the owner, and it isn't in the price of any of the four.

There are three shapes of supplier.

Point solutions do one job well. A rooms booking system, or a till, or a table diary. Cheapest to buy, and most likely to leave you running four of them.

Enterprise platforms cover everything but are built for large groups and international chains. Long implementations, heavy configuration.

Whole-venue systems for independents sit between the two. Rooms, restaurant, bar, spa, events, memberships, payments and stock in one place, sized for a venue with several departments rather than several hundred bedrooms.

Alacer is the third kind. Cambridge based, hospitality and nothing else since 2005, used by venues from eleven bedrooms up to a hundred and seventy-seven across two sites.

No, if they share a database.

When they don't, somebody re-types. A guest's bar tab has to be moved onto their room bill by hand, availability sits in two places, and the guest record is split across three systems.

When they do, a drink rung up at the bar is on the room bill straight away. One record per guest covering what they ate, drank, booked and cancelled. One availability number that every channel reads.

Mark Ayre at Manor House Lindley had it the first way: “separate systems that did not talk to one another and troublesome interfaces that kept dropping.” On Alacer he says: “We've cut out mistakes which can harm reputations and profitability.”

Support is where hospitality software is won or lost, because a till that stops working mid-service cannot wait until Monday.

Alacer's helpdesk is UK based and open 7am to 11pm, 365 days a year, Christmas Day included. Over the last six months, 98.7% of calls were answered by a technical analyst inside 15 seconds.

The software is written in the UK as well, so the people who fix it and the people who build it are in the same company rather than a time zone apart.

Office hours are Monday to Friday. The 365-day cover is the helpdesk.

Every module has a price. What we can't do is add them up before we know which ones you need.

A pub with rooms running a till and a booking engine is a different total from a hotel with a spa, a restaurant, a function suite and a members club. Quoting a single figure would mean quoting the wrong one.

Nothing is made up on the day. The price you agree is the price you pay, upgrades are included rather than charged for, and there's no commission on bookings or vouchers sold through your own website, so growing doesn't cost you more per sale. Adding a module later is the only thing that moves the number.

Tell us what your venue actually runs and we'll price it. If it comes out dearer than everything you're paying now put together, we'll say so.