Blog
What we are building, what broke, and what we would do differently. Written by the people doing the work.
Three delivery tablets, a card machine and a till that only knows about walk-ins. Here is one Friday night traced through all four, why the numbers never agree on Monday, and why HMRC has just spent the summer consulting on what your till has to be able to prove.
Most small-hotel software is sold on a feature list written for a 200-room hotel. Walk one ordinary Saturday through a twelve-room guest house instead — it produces about a dozen genuine requirements, and a visitor levy your booking engine is about to have to collect.
Somewhere in your business a spreadsheet is doing the job of software you never bought. It marks the exact point where off-the-shelf stopped fitting — and it is where the decision to buy, configure, integrate or build should start.
Everything in a supplier's pitch is written by the supplier. Five free UK registers aren't — and thirty minutes with them is the cheapest due diligence available to a business buying software.
From 2029 the UK will mandate e-invoicing for every VAT invoice, and the roadmap lands at Budget 2026. Roughly half of what an AI invoice tool does is a bridge to that date. Here is how to tell the half that expires from the half worth owning — and the fifty-invoice test that settles it in an afternoon.
The rate you quote is the narrowest price on your contract. How to read a UK merchant statement line by line, and the three levers that actually move what you pay to take a card.
Stripe is a set of primitives, not a design. Here are the seven decisions inside every hospitality payment flow, and the brief to hand whoever is building yours.
One question — if this ended on Friday, what leaves with me? — run across delivery apps, OTAs, booking plumbing, development agencies and AI vendors. And why GDPR portability and the EU switching rules will not rescue a UK business.
The ranges in every custom software cost guide are real and useless. Here is how the number actually gets built — and the contract clause that matters more than the price.
A channel manager has never persuaded anyone to book anywhere. What each system in your stack actually does — and six symptoms that tell you which box is broken.
Anyone can build the ordering site in a fortnight. Whether a direct channel survives comes down to six decisions before it — allergens, payments, drivers, the kitchen, delivery pricing and who owns the customer list — and they come in an order.
Ask a hotelier what they pay Booking.com and most say 15%. Here is what actually leaves the account — and the arithmetic that decides whether a direct booking channel is worth building.
