A PM room meaning in Opera PMS, is a pseudo room. Checking in a PM room in Opera is a simple steps process. In this post, we will see some of the important points about PM (Pay Master or Posting Master) rooms.
What Is Posting Master In Opera?
In Opera (or any PMS), you need a bill to post charges, print the bill and checkout. In the PMS, you cannot have such a bill without a guest room.
A Posting Master or PM room is a pseudo or fictitious room that helps open a hotel billing for posting charges and payments just like a real guest room.
Some Reasons, Hotels Use PM Rooms
Below are some of the reasons to use a PM room, but not limited to.
- Posting charges to a group master folio. For instance, if a group is coming from a company, there are charges that the company will pay for all guests. These charges are routed to a PM room that will be paid later by the company.
- Maintaining employee accounts.
- Maintaining the hotel’s petty cash. For instance hotel front office or any other department spends on buying little things for office use, and they want to record and reclaim the charges.
- The hotel’s Business Center want to open a folio in the morning for posting the charges of walk-in guests and maintain a folio for them for the whole day and checkout in the evening.
- The hotel staff want to move a guest folio balance to a temporary room to free up the real room for a few days.
- Receiving charges that have already been settled at the restaurant for reconciliation purposes. For instance, an outside guest at the hotel’s restaurant pays the bill on the spot, and the charges are settled. A copy of these charges is sent to PMS for accountability purposes.
- Receiving missed postings from vendor systems that failed to reach real guest rooms for technical reasons.
- Handling discrepancy guest situations such as the hotel guest skipping without paying the folio. However, the hotel might take days to investigate and sort out the issue. During this time hotel wants to use the physical guestroom.
Creating a PM room in Opera (Rather, ‘Checking in’)
Step 1
When logged into Opera PMS, on the top menu, select Front Desk > House Accounts.
Step 2
Enter profile and reservation details.
Step 3
Once the above details are filled, click on OK and say Yes when Opera asks whether you want to check it. Opera confirms the room successfully checked in.
From now on, the PM room is available for postings. But take a note of the below.
| Entry field | Notes on the fields |
|---|---|
| Profile Name | Create or pick an existing profile. It will be the addressee on the folio. |
| Dates | You can decide when the PM room is needed, from and to dates. Note: You should avoid keeping PM rooms for more than a month. |
| Room Type | The room type is always PM. However, technically, it doesn’t have to be PM, but more of a traditional thing. |
| Room No. | System will give you an available PM room from the pool. |
| Rate Code | Important: Usually, hotels create a rate code and call it ‘PM’. This rate code will have all the room types attached but with zero rates assigned. Selecting a different rate will affect your statistics. For example, if you select a House Use rate code thinking that Business Center is house use, your revenue will show up under House Use. |
| Market Code | Important: Don’t not change the Market Code that gets picked by default when entering the rate code. It will affect your Market Segment statistics. |
