Front office pre-opening checklist for a new small hotel: equipment, forms and accounts

Front office pre-opening is the work of getting the desk ready before the first guest: a reception that protects the guest's documents, the accounts that let you take payment and report the stay (card terminal, KBS access, e-document provider), and the keys, float and printed forms that keep the desk running when systems fail.

The beds arrive on Monday, the first guest on Friday, and the card terminal is still sitting with the bank. Most opening delays are not building delays. They are account delays, and the desk is where they surface. This article is the front office pre-opening checklist for the desk itself: what must physically be there, what must be set up behind it, and how to test the whole chain before anyone checks in. The whole-property project is covered separately in the month-by-month pre-opening plan for a new property; here we stay at the counter.

What has to be ready at the desk before the first guest?#

Three things: a reception that works as a place to stand and sit, the accounts that let you take money and report the stay, and the physical kit that keeps the desk going when the power or the internet fails.

Define the scope first. The front office is the desk where a guest arrives, checks in, asks questions and settles the bill, plus the back office behind it where the safe, printer, key cards and files live. Everything on this list belongs to one of those two places.

Work by dependency, not by cost. Furniture depends on a supplier you can chase; accounts depend on organizations you cannot. Sort your list by who is waiting for whom, and the longest external dependency goes first. The desk must be able to do four things on day one: identify the guest, take the payment, put the charge on the guest's bill, and produce a fiscal document for the stay.

Decide who stands at the desk in the first week and what that person may do without calling the owner: give a discount, void a charge, accept a walk-in, close the day. Keep the back office lockable and out of the lobby's sight line; cash, key cards and guest documents should never be reachable from the guest side of the counter.

How should the reception area be laid out?#

Put the counter where staff can see the entrance and the guest can sign without the waiting area reading over their shoulder. Privacy of documents decides the layout more than appearance does.

Sight line first: from the desk you should see the entrance door and, if there is one, the lift. A desk facing a wall looks calm and cannot watch who walks in. On the guest side, give them a surface at signing height, room to put down a bag, and a pen fixed to the counter so it does not walk away.

Document privacy is a design requirement, not a courtesy. The registration card, the identity document and the screen should face away from the waiting area. Personal data rules (KVKK, the personal data protection law) apply from the first check-in, so collect only what you need and keep it only as long as you need it. The hotel registration card is where this starts in practice.

The waiting area is also a legal minimum for several facility types. A one-star hotel must have a lobby made up of a reception and a waiting area under Article 19(2)(b) of the Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities, consolidated text read 7 November 2026. Boutique hotels need a reception, lobby and sitting area sized at 25% of bed capacity (Article 21(2)(c)); motels need a lobby sized to their capacity (Article 23(2)(c)). For simple accommodation, the new Article 8/A requires a reception at the entrance of facilities with 25 or more rooms, in force since 1 November 2026 (Official Gazette, 26 August 2026, No. 33352).

Place the safe, key encoder and printer behind the counter but within arm's reach, and keep the back office door out of the guest's path. Leave a metre of clear counter for the things that arrive in a guest's hands: a passport, a card, a printed form, a key card wallet.

Which accounts and access rights take the longest?#

The three that depend on another organization: the merchant agreement behind the card terminal, KBS access for guest identity notifications, and an e-document provider for invoices. Start all three before you order furniture.

The card terminal runs on a merchant agreement with a bank or payment provider, opened in the facility's name, with the company documents and signature authority settled first. The terminal is configured to that account, so the paperwork comes before the device. For guest identity, the desk reports through KBS (the guest identity notification system); the facility's own paperwork must be settled before the desk can be set up, and how KBS notification works is covered in a separate article.

E-Fatura and e-Arşiv (electronic invoices) are issued through a licensed integrator. Your system prepares them and the integrator issues them, so decide early who reviews an invoice before it is sent. Make that review rule explicit: an invoice that waits for a person before sending is good practice, and it needs a named person, not a shared login. Alongside these, agree the bank account and settlement: who signs, who reconciles the terminal's daily total, and where that total is recorded at the end of the shift.

No published lead time exists for any of these, and it would be wrong to promise one. Treat each as a queue held by someone else, and start the longest dependency first.

How do you set up the hotel system before the first booking?#

In dependency order: rooms and room types, then rate codes, then revenue codes and departments, then users and permissions, then a test booking. Each step depends on the one before it, and the same order applies in any system; it is described in detail in setting up a new PMS.

A room type is what you sell, a room is what you assign. Enter the physical rooms with floor and features first, because every later step points at them. Then rate codes: one code for each combination you actually sell, such as board basis, market and channel. Too many codes is the most common opening mistake; every extra code is a report nobody reads.

Revenue codes and departments decide where a charge lands on the bill and in the reports (room, restaurant, minibar, spa). Decide this before the first charge is posted, not after. Agree with your accountant which revenue code carries which tax treatment, and record that mapping somewhere the desk can find it.

Users and permissions come next: one login per person, never a shared reception login. Decide who may void a charge, who may discount, and who closes the business day. Then run a test booking and a test night audit, so the first real guest is not also the first test.

If you are choosing software rather than configuring what you inherited, one option worth a look is AI Otel's hotel operating system: reservations, front desk, housekeeping, billing, restaurant sales, reports and compliance in one place. It is built and working, ahead of launch.

What equipment, keys, float and forms belong at the desk?#

A small kit: a way to identify the guest, a way to take payment, a way to make a key, a locked float, and paper for when the screen is dark.

Test the key encoder with a real card and a real door before opening, and keep spare cards and at least one manual key per room. One regulation point matters here: under Article 8/A(1)(f), a simple accommodation room whose door has no electronic lock needs an extra lock, in force since 1 November 2026 (Official Gazette, 26 August 2026, No. 33352).

Agree the float amount with the owner in writing, count it at every shift change, and keep the safe code with two people rather than one. Print the forms the desk will need: registration card, walk-in record, no-show and cancellation record, cash receipt, incident log and guest request log. The fallback pack is the piece most often forgotten: a printed room list, a printed rate sheet, blank registration cards, a written record of payments taken, and phone numbers that work when the internet does not.

Do not forget the small things that stop a check-in: pens, a stapler, folders for the night's paperwork, a clock the guest can see, and a telephone that is not the software.

How do you run a test guest from booking to checkout?#

Create a fake reservation a week before opening and take it all the way to a closed bill and an invoice. Every step that fails there is a step that would have failed with a real guest at the counter.

Book through every route you will actually use: telephone, walk-in, your own website, and an agency if you take agency business. Check in with a real identity document, produce the KBS notification, assign a room, encode a key and walk to the door to prove it opens. Handling an arrival without a reservation is its own skill; the walk-in guest procedure covers it.

Post a restaurant charge and a minibar charge, and check that each lands on the right bill and the right revenue code. Run the night audit and confirm the business day moves and the reports make sense to someone who did not set them up. Check out, take the payment on the terminal, issue the invoice, then void and reverse the charge to prove that corrections work before you need them.

Test the fallback too: switch off the internet for thirty minutes, check a guest in on paper, then enter it when the connection returns. The front desk checklist for when the internet goes down gives the full sequence. Write down what failed and who fixes it, with a date. A test with no written result becomes an opinion.

What to do next#

Write the desk's day-one list this week, mark every item that depends on another organization, and start those first. Then put the test guest in the calendar for the week before opening. The pieces fit in one order: accounts come first, then the desk, then the system setup, then the test, and the test is what lets you open on a date you chose rather than a date someone else chose for you. If you want to see how a hotel operating system built with this order in mind looks before launch, request a briefing.