"A verandah is where you look out over the property and take it all in. Not a back office. Not a cockpit. A calm, elevated view of what you run."
One platform that replaces your roster, day sheet, maintenance log, spa diary, procurement spreadsheet, and reporting pack — and runs the whole operation in one place.
Every boutique lodge and hotel we've spoken to runs on the same patchwork of disconnected tools. The roster is someone's Friday spreadsheet. The maintenance log is a WhatsApp group nobody can search. The spa diary is a hardcover book behind the desk.
The result: your management team spends 10–15 hours every week maintaining tools instead of managing the property. Reporting is always late. When a staff member leaves, their knowledge leaves too. And the GM quietly burns out.
There has never been a platform built specifically for the operational management of an independent boutique property — at the right scale, the right price, and built by people who've actually run one.
Different roles. Different daily pain. One platform that covers all of them.
"Open Verandah on Sunday evening and see exactly how the weekend went — without calling anyone."
You want visibility across the property — or across the group — without being the person who has to ask for it. You want to know your reporting is right, your rosters are submitted, your maintenance is tracked, and your compliance is in order.
You buy Verandah to reduce key-person risk and management overhead. When your GM is on leave, the property doesn't grind to a halt — because everything is in the system.
"Everything I need to run the day — in one place, before 7am."
Right now your day starts by piecing together information from five different sources: the printed day sheet, the roster email, the maintenance WhatsApp, the spa diary, and whatever fell through the cracks overnight.
You buy Verandah to get your evenings back. The administration that runs your property shouldn't take 10 hours a week of your management time. That time belongs to your guests and your team.
"My department runs on Verandah. My team knows what they're doing. Nothing falls through the cracks."
You don't want to chase the GM for a procurement approval. You don't want to email around a new roster version. You don't want to log a maintenance job in a WhatsApp group and wonder if anyone saw it.
You buy Verandah because your working day gets 30% shorter. Your module is your department's system of record — your team's roster, their tasks, their stock list, all in one place they actually use.
Verandah covers the full operational picture of a boutique property — across five module groups.
Revenue on Book, Pickup Dashboard, Pace Report, Daily Sales, Cost of Sales, Budget vs Actual, Utility Dashboard, Fleet Log, Bank Balance. Role-gated — HODs see only their section.
Weekly financial report, daily bank balance reconciliation, payments, and G/L account configuration. Schema-driven and tenant-scoped — already SaaS-shaped.
Marketing activity calendar, paid social ad planning, organic content calendar, email marketing, annual budget by channel, cost reconciliation, partners and trade events.
Recipe costing linked to Procurement for live ingredient costs, menu builder, multi-venue food stocktakes, cleaning schedule, and F&B document repository.
Par-based weekly ordering by department, manager approval workflow, ad-hoc POs, items master with par levels and costs, spend analytics, and automatic PO emails to suppliers.
Central supplier directory — contacts, payment terms, category tags, documents, group-level with property overrides. Shared external link for supplier access.
One branded portal per guest on a stay.* subdomain. Pre-arrival capture (preferences, allergies, transfers), in-stay content (dining, room info, after-hours contacts), and unified spa/restaurant/activity booking. Magic-link delivery — no login.
Guest booking portal, therapist schedules, treatment catalogue, add-ons (upsells), voucher redemption, and walk-ins. Integrated with the Operations day sheet.
Reservations, covers tracking, table status, real-time kitchen messaging, menu management, per-guest history, and branded guest portal.
Game drives, yoga, boat trips, guided walks — session management, capacity, guide assignment, utilisation reports, and a public guest booking portal.
Direct booking on your own website — room types, live rates, promo codes, deposits and card payment. Drops into your existing site with one line of code, branded per property.
Vouchers, Events with BEOs, Group Calculator, Email Templates, Booking Documents, and Lost & Found — all in one container module.
One inbox for every guest enquiry. WhatsApp threads (Cloud API direct integration), website form submissions, and conversion stats showing which channels actually book.
Live day sheet, 7-day week view, guest transfers, and TV mode — a public display running on the front-desk screen showing today's full picture in large, readable type.
Grid-based drag-and-drop rostering, period management, staff groups, shift templates, staff-facing My Roster view, leave management, and rostering analytics.
Multi-area linen stocktakes with par tracking, recurring cleaning schedule, chemical register with SDS attachments, and a documents library for the team.
Kanban task board by department with photos and comments, ad-hoc shopping list, private manager notes accessible from anywhere, mobile quick-note for capture on the move.
Cross-module calendar pulling deadlines from Licences, IT, Maintenance, Procurement, and more. Manual items addable. Role-filtered — each person sees what's relevant to them.
Asset register, plant equipment, fault log with photos, spare parts stock, preventive maintenance calendar, and electrical plans. Jobs tracked from report to close.
Fleet register, compliance tracking, repairs log, cost history, per-trip log with driver and odometer, bulk fuel tracking (tanks, deliveries, balances), compliance alerts.
Hardware inventory, software licence tracking with renewal alerts, network documentation, IT supplier contacts, and a troubleshooting knowledge base.
Animal register (horses, game), day logbook per animal, vet and farrier scheduling, ride waiver capture, game counts, and the conservation project tracker. Built for lodges with active animal operations.
Trading licences, alcohol licences, insurance certificates, statutory appointments, and the incident log. Renewal dates feed the Property Calendar so nothing slips. Company identity reference for legal entity details.
Staff directory, contracts, disciplinary records, staff loans with deduction tracking, uniforms management, new-hire onboarding wizard, and staff analytics.
Wiki-style internal knowledge base — Department → Process → Variation hierarchy, TipTap editor with images, full-text search, revision history, print stylesheet for noticeboards.
We'll walk through the modules that match your operation — on actual data from a working hotel.
Chris Roberts is CEO of Authentic Retreats, a South African boutique hotel group with two properties on the Eastern Cape coast: Prana Lodge at Chintsa Bay and Oceana Reserve at Port Alfred. Both are 5-star, wellness-positioned, independently owned.
In early 2025, Chris took over as acting GM at Prana during a leadership transition. Within a month he had a list of thirty things with no system: the roster, the day sheet, the maintenance log, the restaurant diary, the spa diary, the procurement process, the reporting pack.
He tried the existing software. PMS vendors wanted to sell him a reservation system he didn't need. ERP vendors quoted R450,000 upfront and a six-month implementation. Point tools wouldn't integrate.
So he built it. Starting with Spa in June 2025 — each module built from the actual daily problem, tested the same week at Prana, rolled to Oceana once stable. Thirteen months later: twenty-five modules, in daily use across both properties.
In early 2026 he began commercialising it as Verandah. Not because a venture capitalist told him to — because every hotelier he showed it to had the same problem.
Not a feature list dreamed up in a boardroom. Every screen was built because somebody at Prana or Oceana needed it on a specific Tuesday. The spa upsell system, the TV mode for the day sheet, the procurement approval workflow — all built from real operational pain.
More than a year of building, testing, and iterating in live 5-star hotel operation before Verandah was offered to any external customer. When you use Verandah, you're using the same platform that runs Prana Lodge and Oceana Reserve every day.
Built for a group from the start — not a single-property tool with multi-property bolted on afterwards. Every record carries a property_id and tenant_id. Groups get consolidated dashboards. Each property keeps its own configuration.
Verandah is backed by a real hotel operating business, not a venture-funded startup chasing an exit. We use this platform ourselves, every single day. We have as much interest in it continuing to work perfectly as you do.
Booking systems fill the rooms and stop. Verandah takes the reservation, runs the day behind it — the roster, the maintenance, the procurement, the spa diary — and carries it all the way into the ledger. Here's how that compares.
| Operational capability | Verandah | ResRequest | Nightsbridge | RoomRaccoon | CiMSO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital operations day sheet | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial |
| Staff rostering with approval workflow | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Spa booking & scheduling | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial |
| Activity booking with guide assignment | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Maintenance job tracking (photo evidence) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial |
| Departmental management reporting | ✓ | Revenue only | ✗ | Revenue only | Heavy ERP |
| Par-based procurement ordering | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Recipe costing linked to procurement | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Vehicle compliance & fleet tracking | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Cloud-native, mobile-first, no IT team | ✓ | Partial | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Priced for 8–80 room boutique | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Reservations, front desk & folios | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
CiMSO has the closest operational breadth — but is on-premise, legacy architecture, requires an IT team on site, and is priced for large resorts. Verandah delivers comparable depth in a cloud-native, mobile-first product priced for boutique.
Integration note: Verandah can run as your complete system, or alongside the reservation system you already use — data exchange with ResRequest, Nightsbridge and Mews is via CSV today. Ask us about your specific setup.
An operations tier for each property, plus guest modules you switch on only where you use them. Published prices, monthly invoicing, unlimited staff accounts on every tier.
Small B&Bs and guesthouses — 5–15 rooms, one front desk.
A single boutique hotel or game lodge running full operations.
Two to three properties under one operator, rolled up.
Four or more properties, large reserves, or multi-tenant operators.
Switch on per property — a lodge without a spa never pays for one.
A one-off implementation covers configuration, data migration (roster, staff, vehicles, suppliers, treatments, menus, assets) and department-by-department training. The longer the commitment, the less it costs to get started.
| Contract length | Implementation | Monthly rate |
|---|---|---|
| Month-to-month | R12,000 | List price |
| 6-month | R6,000 (50% off) | List price |
| 12-month | Waived | List price |
| 24-month | Waived | 10% off list |
Lite has no implementation fee on any contract — it's self-serve from day one. Pay annually upfront for a further 10% off your monthly rate on 12- and 24-month contracts.
The value calculation: a single lodge on Standard with the full guest stack — Spa, Restaurant, Activities and WhatsApp — comes to about R4,100 per property / month. A GM losing 10–15 hours a week to spreadsheets costs the property R150,000–R200,000 a year in loaded time. Verandah pays that back inside six months — before the compliance fines you avoid (a missed liquor-licence renewal is R20,000+), the revenue leakage you close, and the HOD admin time you hand back.
Two answers, and you pick. Verandah has its own PMS — reservations, rates, the room grid, check-in, folios and the guest ledger — so it can replace what you're running and give you the operating day in the same system. Or leave your booking system exactly where it is and run Verandah alongside it for everything your PMS doesn't touch: the day sheet, the roster, the maintenance log, the procurement, the reporting.
Most properties start alongside and migrate later, once they trust it. There's no obligation to move your reservations on day one.
Your GM spends 10–15 hours per week on spreadsheets. At a fully-loaded cost, that's R150,000–R200,000 per year in management time. A full-operations Standard property is R28,800 per year, and Lite starts at R10,800. Payback is typically under six months — and that's before the compliance fines you avoid and the HOD admin time you free up.
Verandah starts at R900/month for Lite and R2,400/month for a full-operations Standard property. For most properties that's a fraction of the management time it hands back — and if you move your reservations across too, it replaces a bill you're already paying.
Verandah is mobile-optimised and built to be usable on slow connections. The management layer — rosters, reporting, day sheets, task boards — works on a basic data connection. The product is genuinely usable on a phone from anywhere on the property.
That said, we're building a lodge with no internet on the radar. Offline caching for key views is on the Phase 2 roadmap. Ask us about your specific connectivity situation — we'll be straight with you.
Verandah was designed by lodge managers, not engineers. It works on any phone or tablet, requires no installation, and has a two-day onboarding — not a six-month implementation. If your team can use WhatsApp, they can use Verandah. Your HODs will have their module set up in an afternoon.
You switch on one module at a time. Typically Operations and Roster first (biggest immediate wins), then the rest over 4–6 weeks. Nothing forces you to move your reservations — that's a separate decision you can take later, or never. No big-bang switchover, no downtime, no drama.
Most operational tools fail because they're siloed — a shift handover tool here, a maintenance log there. Your team ends up using three tools plus spreadsheets, and the silos recreate themselves. Verandah covers the whole operating day in one platform, which is why it sticks — there's no incentive to go back to WhatsApp when everything is already in one place.
If you keep your reservation system, data can be exchanged with ResRequest, Nightsbridge and Mews via CSV import/export today, and direct API integrations are on the roadmap. If you'd rather consolidate, Verandah's own PMS removes the question — reservations, rates and the front desk all live in the same system as everything else. Tell us what you run and we'll be straight with you about which route fits.
Verandah is backed by Authentic Retreats Group — a real hotel operating business with two 5-star properties, not a venture-funded startup. We use this platform ourselves, every day. Your data is always exportable via CSV from any module, with a full database export available on request. Standard SaaS data processing agreement. No lock-in.
Supabase (PostgreSQL), encrypted at rest and in transit. Row-level security enforced at the database layer — no tenant can see another tenant's data. Your data belongs to you. Standard cloud SaaS data protections. Full details in our data processing agreement.
You could. It took more than a year of full-time building by someone who was simultaneously running two hotels. If that's a better use of your management team's time and budget than R2,400 a month, build it. The challenge isn't finding a tool that holds data — it's building one that's connected across departments, real-time on mobile, and generates proper management reports automatically.
Continuously. The platform is deployed to production multiple times per week. No version numbers, no upgrade cycles, no "this feature is coming in Q3." You're always on the current version. New modules are announced to customers before launch.
No free tier — but there's a full 30-day free trial with no credit card required. The platform is deep enough that a free tier would misrepresent what it actually does. The trial gives you everything: all modules, real configuration, and guided onboarding.
A focused demo on the modules most relevant to your property. Real data. No commitment. No sales pressure.
Tell us about your property and we'll respond within one business day.