Comparison
The notebook, the WhatsApp group, the spreadsheet, and us
Your notes already travel somewhere. The question isn't whether you have a solution, it's what it costs you when it fails.
This page compares the four approaches honestly, including when ours adds nothing. Every line in the table can be checked on screen, in a demo.
The table
| What you'd expect | Paper logbook | WhatsApp group | Shared spreadsheet | Front Desk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everyone writes under their own name, without having to type it | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| You know by name who's read a note | No | Partly | No | Yes |
| Information belongs to the property, not to personal phones | Yes | No | Partly | Yes |
| Can be found again through search, months later | No | Partly | Partly | Yes |
| Works from a corridor, on a phone | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| A note closes once handled | Partly | No | Partly | Yes |
| Several people can write at the same time | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| An edit leaves a trace | Partly | No | No | Yes |
| Stays in place when whoever wrote it leaves | Yes | No | Partly | Yes |
| Can be switched off at the end of a shift | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
The detail, option by option
The notebook on the counter
It never breaks down, it needs no password, and everyone knows how to use it. For a three-person team that sees each other every day, it does the job.
It's in one place: housekeeping doesn't have it, neither does the maintenance manager. Nothing shows who's read what, a torn-out page leaves no trace, and finding what was written about room 214 six months ago means flipping through six months of notebook.
The WhatsApp group
It's instant, everyone already has it, and there's nothing to install. For reaching someone right away, nothing beats it, and we don't claim to replace it on that point.
What matters gets drowned out by everything else. A note written at 11pm is three hundred messages behind by morning, nobody knows who's read it, and nothing ever closes. The group lives on the team's personal phones: it doesn't get switched off at the end of a shift, it leaves with whoever leaves the job, and a former employee keeps the property's history after they're gone.
The shared spreadsheet
It structures what a notebook leaves messy: columns, filters, a readable history. It's often a team's first serious attempt at getting organised, and it's a good instinct.
Only one person can have it open for editing at a time, the writer's name is typed in by hand, a deleted line disappears without a trace, and the table is unreadable on a phone. The file ends up in three versions the moment someone makes a copy.
Project management tools
Trello, Notion and similar tools are good at tracking tasks, assigning them and closing them out. On that specific point, they do the job, and a small team can make do with them.
They're built for projects that run for weeks, not for a handover that happens every eight hours. There's no concept of a shift, no clocking in, no read confirmation, and everything has to be built from scratch. The vocabulary isn't the trade's own, which is enough to put off a housekeeping team.
When you don't need us
If there are two of you running five rooms and you see each other every morning, a notebook is enough. One more tool won't save you time, it'll cost you time.
If what you need is to reach someone right away, a message is still faster than any app. Many of our properties keep their group chat for immediate emergencies and write down in Front Desk what needs to stay on record: the two aren't for the same thing.
If you're looking to manage bookings, room planning or billing, that's not us either: that's your property management system's job, and we don't replace it.
The best comparison is still your own shift
Try it for a week, with your team and your real notes. 6-month free trial on every tool, no card required.