Bedbooking cooperation with InvoiceOcean

BedBooking is a mobile booking calendar for short-term rental accommodation facilities. We help in the operation of small and medium-sized rental businesses. We support areas such as:

• managing the availability of accommodation,
• pricing policy,
• OTA sales (Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Homeaway, etc.),
• communication with hotel guests,
• cleaning,
• bills and invoices,
• reports and statistics.

Our PMS (Property Management System) booking system is available on Google Android, Apple iOS, Huawei App Gallery, Microsoft Store, and on desktops as a web application. Just look at user reviews on Google Play or App Store. Our clients are mostly property owners, managers in hotels, guest houses, guest rooms, private accommodations, agritourism and camping accommodations. Thanks to the versatility of our solutions and the ingenuity of our customers, our mobile booking calendar is also successfully used in car rentals, specialized construction machinery and animal rentals.

My name is Dawid Łukasiewicz and I am the president of the board and product manager.

The idea for BedBooking was born in 2012 at RST Software Masters. The project was implemented internally with the aim of building the company's competences in the field of a mobile platform. As our parent company had the experience in tourism management (NetTur), we came up with an idea for a mobile booking calendar. Unlike complex hotel systems, the solution was designed to be simple, intuitive, and aimed at innovating property management. As a result, we built a mobile reception desk available on the phone or tablet for small and medium-sized accommodation facilities.

Our team of product managers, programmers, testers, support and marketing specialists, accounting and human resources is responsible for shaping the product. I want them to enjoy what they do in their daily work. This enables us to recognize and respond to our users' needs and build a great product that we can be proud of.

Thanks to Google Play and Apple App Store, BedBooking is available for users on various continents. That is why we needed an independent sales channel that would be accessible in all regions of the world. InvoiceOcean is an invoicing system that is supported in many language versions and currencies. At the same time, it offers good value for money. Originally, InvoiceOcean served as an internal tool for sending invoices and reporting sales. As BedBooking developed, our users' needs increased. Sending a sales document (invoice or receipt) was one of the requested features that our users wanted us to implement.

We considered two solutions: building it on our own or using an existing solution on the market could be adapted to our needs. After researching the market, we found that there was no such solution that would satisfy us. Then our CTO, Piotr Pękala, suggested integrating with InvoiceOcean, which would become our “adapted” module for managing finances for accommodation facilities. We were familiar with the product because we had been using it successfully ourselves for several years. We knew that InvoiceOcean is a good and stable service, supporting various language versions, and offering a lot of personalization and configuration functions (e.g. second tax). During the market research, I analysed several alternative invoicing systems, including open source solutions or popular commercial services, but most of the tools were focused on the domestic market. In terms of commercial services, InvoiceOcean’s offer was highly competitive, both in terms of functionality and price.

On December 14, 2018, I wrote the first e-mail to InvoiceOcean about this. Mr. Marcin Stefaniak (President of the Management Board at InvoiceOcean) turned out to be a person open to the idea of cooperation. In August 2019, we completed the pilot period of the service (closed tests with the BedBooking user community), and a month later the service was available to all our users. In less than 9 months, we were able to better understand each other, refine the terms of cooperation and adjust the InvoiceOcean's product to our individual needs.

First of all, our client and our client's customers (hotel guest) receive the sales document in their own language. The invoice or the bill is legible. We used to use several foreign services and we know that sales documents created with those tools were not always legible.

We managed to automate the sales process. Invoices are issued automatically and the data is loaded into the accounting software.

Thanks to the recent improvements of the integration with the InvoiceOcean, we have reduced the time needed to post sales documents from 3 days to 3 hours.

For an entrepreneur, sending sales documents is an obligation required by law. This process must be simple and consume as little time as possible for the team. We leave issues related to the changes in regulations, legislation of accounting systems, and new trends to specialists from InvoiceOcean. Thanks to this, my team and I can focus on meeting our users' needs and developing our core product – a reservation management system.

Yes, I would, I have recommended the system to our users. Can you find a better recommendation?