Proposal · Property Management System
A front office built around how you actually sell — room-nights and per-person retreats — against fifteen lodges that all have names.
You asked for front office: reservations, room posting, payment, room allocation, invoicing and CRM. Before quoting, I looked at how Polwaththa actually runs — because that changes what those six words have to mean.
You have fifteen lodges plus the bungalow across thirteen acres — four wooden cabanas and eleven mud-and-brick, each one different. The Cabin sits thirty metres from the restaurant; number fourteen, the Victoria Lake View, is a four-hundred-and-fifty-metre walk. Some lodges split into two rooms sharing a balcony. Your own site promises that if walking is a concern, you'll put a guest closer in. That promise is a scheduling rule, and right now it lives in somebody's memory.
And you sell two different things against those same fifteen lodges. Ordinary room-nights through Booking.com, Expedia and Agoda — priced per lodge, per night. And your yoga and nature retreats — four, five and seven day — priced per person, by sharing tier, bundling every meal, a counted number of classes, the jungle trek, the cooking lesson, the tree planting and the Digana pickup.
Those two are not the same shape, and that single fact is what this whole proposal turns on.
Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier and the rest are good software. They would run your room-nights beautifully on day one. But every one of them models a booking as one room, so many nights, one rate — and a retreat isn't that. Three friends sharing a lodge on the five-day programme is one lodge, three people, three sets of dietary needs, three health forms and twenty-one class places.
Buy one of those systems and your room-nights get tidy while your retreats stay on a spreadsheet — which is the situation you're trying to leave. What I'm proposing keeps one record per person underneath the booking. That one design decision is what makes retreats, dietary sheets, class registers and split bills all work without a second system.
On your booking widget
You already take payments through Tab on your website, which is a good fit for a property like yours — international cards, settled in your currency. The plan keeps Tab exactly where it is and connects it, so a booking taken there lands in the system with the payment already recorded against it. Detail in section 05.
Two phases. Phase 1 is a complete, usable front office on its own — you could stop there and be far better off than today. Phase 2 makes it native to how retreats actually run.
Everything you asked for · ~4–5 weeks
Optional · quote it now, start it when you're ready · ~3 weeks
Priced once we've seen Tab's documentation
Phase 1 splits across three milestones. Each one is a working thing you check and sign off before the next begins — no payment for work you haven't seen.
| Milestone | You accept it when | Share | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Foundation Inventory, rates, retreat programmes, staff access |
All 15 lodges and the bungalow are configured with their real capacities and distances, all three retreat programmes price correctly at every sharing tier, and your staff can log in at their own permission levels. | 45% | $540 |
| 2 · Bookings & guests Reservations, allocation, guest records |
You can take a triple-sharing five-day retreat from enquiry to confirmed — three guest records created, dietary and health captured, waivers sent, one lodge allocated with no clash — and a normal room-night booking alongside it. | 30% | $360 |
| 3 · Money & handover Folio, invoicing, reports, training |
An invoice comes out with the correct Sri Lankan taxes, agent balances are right, the reports reconcile against a month of your real bookings, and your team has been trained. | 25% | $300 |
Why it's weighted to the front. Not a cash grab — it reflects where the work actually sits. Modelling fifteen individual lodges, three retreat programmes across three sharing tiers, and the per-person record structure underneath is the densest and least visible part of the build. By the time you're clicking through screens in milestone two, most of the thinking is already done and paid for.
Nothing gets thrown away.
Said plainly, so there's no surprise later. None of this is hard to add afterwards — it's just not in these numbers.
Five things I'll need from you. None are urgent today.
I'm Aman Shukla — a Zoho developer of about five years, Zoho Creator certified, with clients across more than ten countries. Most of what Phase 1 needs I've built before in other shapes: reservation logic, allocation rules, folios, multi-currency invoicing with local tax stacks, guest records merged across channels. Very little of this starts from a blank page, which is why the estimate is what it is rather than double.
What I don't have is a hundred eco-lodges behind me — so I read your site, your programme pricing and your listings properly before writing a line of this, and I'd rather show you that homework than a portfolio of screenshots. You'll deal with me directly throughout, not a team you never meet.