This is a true story. Once upon a time, my property was plagued with a pesky issue with Automanage Housekeeping in Host. Randomly, without warning, it would post all the housekeeper pays at zero for the day. Since this process is done at the end of the day, and for us, the process takes a while since at the time we had over 1350 units, this was a nightmare for the Housekeeping supervisor to manually recreate the data.

After working with SMS Support and tracking everything we could think of that could be the cause for nearly a year, we were still no closer to a solution than when we started. There was no rhyme or reason why this occasionally happened.

I went to the HUG Conference that year and walked into the Housekeeping session. When Rick Downing from SMS pulled up the first Power Point screen and reviewed each line, THERE IT WAS! The answer to our problem.

At the time, when you generated housekeeping in SMS, it would automatically default to, "Manage by Unit" and if you managed housekeeping by Reservation, as we did, you had to remember to change this default. When we forgot to change this default, it would return zeros for all the housekeeper pays that day. Ouch.

We never even considered that the issue was caused at the beginning of the day, since the pay process is generated at the end of the day. A simple slip and it caused HUGE issues.

After discussing with other users at the conference and with SMS, they added a new Misc Default that allowed you to select as the global default either to Manage by Reservation or Manage by Unit, so you would not have to make sure you selected the correct one every day. (Character F-L-H-2) Problem solved.

A new enhancement that benefited lots of SMS clients, including us. All because I attended the HUG Conference that year.

This is just one of many examples I could give where my property benefited from such AH-HA moments at HUG Conferences.

Sometimes the AH-HA came from SMS experts and sometimes from other SMS users just like you and me. I can honestly say that at every HUG Conference I have attended I've returned home with at least one huge idea, fix, enhancement, or process change that benefited my property. Many times, it was a lot more than one. Money well spent!

Bring your list of issues, frustrations, enhancement ideas, secret tips and tricks and come to the HUG Conference this year at Chateau Elan. I bet you will find or you will contribute at least one AH-HA moment yourself!

Kathy Traylor