When a guest checks out, Zitlin marks the room dirty and creates the cleaning task automatically. Housekeeping staff update status from their phones. Front desk sees the room go clean in real time — no calls, no whiteboard.
The most common housekeeping problem in independent hotels is not dirty rooms — it is communication lag. A room is cleaned at 11am. The front desk doesn't know until a housekeeper walks over and says so. Meanwhile a guest is waiting at reception. The room was ready for 40 minutes before anyone knew.
Zitlin's housekeeping module eliminates that lag. Room status updates happen in the system, not in conversation. Front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance all read from the same screen.
Housekeeping Updates from Any Android Device
The Room Board — the Whole Property in One Screen
Open Housekeeping → Rooms and every room you have is there once, grouped by room type, each tile carrying the trade's own shorthand:
| Status | Code | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Vacant Clean | VC | Empty and ready. The room you can sell right now. |
| Vacant Dirty | VD | Empty and needs turning — usually last night's departure. |
| In-house Clean | OC | Guest in the room, serviced today. |
| In-house Dirty | OD | Guest in the room, not serviced yet. |
| DND | — | Guest declined service today. |
| Maintenance | OOS | Something is being fixed. Still sellable. |
| Out of Order | OOO | Blocked with dates on it, and off sale. |
Each status is two facts in one word: what condition the room is in, and whether anybody is in it. The second half you never type. It comes from your bookings, so it cannot drift — check a guest in and the room reads In-house, check them out and it reads Vacant Dirty the same second.
Across the top of the board is a count per status. Tap Vacant Dirty at seven in the morning and you have the whole shift's work in one go, with the arrival time showing on every tile that has a deadline on it.
Room status flow:
| Event | What the room reads as | Who sees it |
|---|---|---|
| Guest checks in | In-house — OC or OD | Front desk, housekeeping |
| Guest checks out | Vacant Dirty, cleaning task stamped with the time | Housekeeping, front desk |
| Cleaning marked complete | Vacant Clean — and the day's task closes with it | Front desk |
| Guest waves the cleaner away | DND, today only | Housekeeping, front desk |
| Room flagged for maintenance | Maintenance (OOS) — still sellable | Front desk, management |
| Room blocked with dates | Out of Order (OOO) — off sale | Front desk, management |
No phone calls. No whiteboard. No "is 204 ready yet?"
The Day's Work, Raised From Your Bookings
Most of the board should arrive without anyone typing it. Turn on the three switches under Property Information and Zitlin reads your reservation book every hour, in your property's own timezone, and raises the day's work:
- Arrival tasks — the room made ready before the guest gets there
- Stayover tasks — the refresh a guest in house needs, every night or every third night, whichever you set
- Departure tasks — the day's expected check-outs on the board at 7am, instead of found out room by room as keys come back
Checking a guest out marks the room dirty and stamps that day's departure card with the real time — Guest checked out at 11:24 AM — rather than adding a second card for the same room.
New tasks land in the pool unassigned. At the start of a shift the supervisor selects eight rooms and hands them to one cleaner in a single action; the Mine filter then gives that person their own list, and on a shared tablet it follows whoever punched in with their PIN rather than the account the device is logged into. Staff move a card Assigned → In Progress → Completed from an Android phone, and the room's status moves with it.
Maintenance and Inspections
Housekeeping tasks are not limited to cleaning. There are three types, and the note on the card carries the detail:
- Cleaning — departure turns, stayover refreshes, linen changes, and the pre-arrival make-up with extra bed, flowers for the anniversary written on it
- Maintenance — broken fixture, leaking tap, faulty AC, or damage found after a checkout. Raising one puts the room on Maintenance immediately, so everyone reads the same thing about it
- Inspection — a supervisor check or a periodic deep clean, recorded without touching the room's own status
Each task carries an assignee, a status, a note and a room — or an event space, because a banquet hall needs turning around too. One view shows every open task across the property: what is pending, what is in progress, what is done, and what a guest declined.
Daily Task Sheets for Housekeeping Staff
At the start of each shift, you can export the day's housekeeping tasks as a spreadsheet — a printed or digital worksheet for your team lead, and the answer for properties where not every housekeeper carries a smartphone on shift.
The export carries the date the work belongs to, the task type, the room or event space, the notes, who it is assigned to, and the status — exactly the columns the board shows. Hand it over at the start of the shift, collect it back at the end, and update the board in bulk. It is a paper backup, not a replacement for the live board.
Integration with Front Desk and Folios
Because housekeeping is part of the same Zitlin system — not a separate app — the answer reaches the desk instead of waiting to be asked for.
Open a booking and the room's status is spelled out next to the room name, on the same screen as the Check In button — Vacant Clean, Vacant Dirty, Maintenance. Assign a room to a walk-in and the buttons in the picker carry VC, VD and OOS, so the clean one is picked by looking rather than by phoning. Mark the room clean on the board and the day's cleaning task closes with it, so the two never disagree.
There is no sync delay and no API call between two systems, because there is only one system and one database behind all of it.
What cleanliness does not do is take a room off sale. At eleven in the morning half the property is dirty and every one of those rooms is still sellable and still checkable-in — that is the whole point of a turnaround. A room on Maintenance is sellable too: it is a note about condition, for the dripping tap you will fix this afternoon. When a room genuinely must not be sold, you block it with dates, and it reads Out of Order everywhere. One deliberate decision, in one place, rather than a room quietly disappearing from availability because somebody left a card open.
Zitlin vs Dedicated Housekeeping Apps
| Zitlin | Dedicated housekeeping app | Spreadsheet / WhatsApp | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto task creation on checkout | Yes | Yes | No |
| Room status on the front desk's own screen | Yes | Requires integration | No |
| Maintenance tasks in same system | Yes | Sometimes | No |
| Staff updates from Android app | Yes | Yes | No |
| Integrated with PMS and invoicing | Yes | No — separate system | No |
| Damage charged to the guest's folio before checkout | Same system | Separate system | Manual |
| Daily task sheet export | Yes | Yes | Manual |
| Cost | Included in Zitlin | Separate subscription | Free but unreliable |
Standalone housekeeping apps like Optii, Quore, and HotSOS are sold as a second subscription on top of your PMS, with their own login and their own sync to maintain. That overhead buys a chain with a dedicated housekeeping department some genuinely deep workflow tooling. For an independent property — at 20 rooms or at 200 — it mostly buys a second system to keep in step with the first.
Zitlin's housekeeping module covers what an independent property actually needs at any size: a room board the whole team reads the same way, work raised from the booking book instead of typed, maintenance and DND tracked honestly, batch assignment at the start of a shift, and room status readable at the front desk — from one system the entire team already uses.
Who This Is For
Zitlin's housekeeping features work best for:
- Independent hotels and resorts of any size where housekeeping coordination happens informally and room status communication causes delays — the board opens as quickly at 200 rooms as at 20, grouped by room type and cut down to a single status with one tap
- Larger properties running housekeeping in shifts, where work is handed out in batches at the start of the day and each housekeeper needs their own list rather than the whole property
- Guesthouses and B&Bs where the same small team handles front desk, cleaning, and maintenance and needs everything visible in one place
- Serviced apartment operators managing multiple units where room readiness directly affects check-in timing
- Properties in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia where Android-first mobile tools are the practical choice for housekeeping staff
Room status that updates itself
When a guest checks out, Zitlin marks the room dirty and creates the cleaning task. Housekeepers update from their phones and the front desk sees it go clean in real time.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does Zitlin automatically create a cleaning task when a guest checks out? Yes, with Auto-create housekeeping tasks turned on — it is a switch under Property Information, off until you turn it on, because some teams raise everything by hand. With it on, recording a checkout marks the room Vacant Dirty and stamps that day's cleaning card with the time the guest actually left. Three further switches raise the day's arrival, stayover and departure work from your bookings every hour.
Can housekeeping staff update room status from their phones? Yes. The Zitlin Android app lets housekeeping staff view their tasks and update status — Assigned, In Progress, Completed — or mark a room clean, dirty, on maintenance or DND straight from the room board. It is the same status the front desk reads, so the next time the desk looks, the answer is already right.
Does the front desk see room status updates immediately? Yes. There is no sync delay and nothing to reconcile — one database, one status. Open the booking and the room's status is next to the room name, on the same screen as the Check In button.
Can I track maintenance requests separately from cleaning tasks? Yes. Maintenance is its own task type — broken fixture, equipment issue, plumbing — with its own assignee, and raising one puts the room on Maintenance (OOS) straight away, everywhere the status is shown. A room on Maintenance is still sellable, which is what you want for a tap you will fix this afternoon. To take a room off sale, block it with dates: it then reads Out of Order.
Can I prevent a dirty room from being sold or checked into? Not by cleanliness, and deliberately not. At eleven in the morning most of your property is dirty and all of it is sellable — blocking those rooms would make a normal turnaround day impossible. What Zitlin does instead is make the condition impossible to miss: the room picker tags every button VC, VD or OOS, and the booking screen spells the status out next to the Check In button, so nobody hands over a key to a room that has not been turned without seeing it first.
To make a room genuinely unsellable — refurbishment, an owner's stay, a flood — block it with dates. It reads Out of Order on the board and disappears from availability.
Does Zitlin support supervisor inspections? Inspection is one of the three task types, so a supervisor check is raised, assigned and completed like any other card. It is deliberately the one type that never moves the room's own status: a room is clean or it is not, and an inspection is a record of somebody having looked. There is no separate Inspected state and no inspection gate before a room can be sold.
What if a guest declines service? Tap DND on the room. It closes the day for that room without pretending it was serviced — declined rooms are counted apart from completed ones in the housekeeping report, and are left out of each person's completion figures. That is today only. For a guest who wants no daily service for the whole stay, turn on No daily service on the booking instead; no stayover task is raised for the rest of their stay, while the clean before they arrive and the strip after they leave still happen.
Can I export a daily task list for housekeeping staff? Yes. Filter the board to All Incomplete and download the CSV — date, task type, room or event space, notes, assignee and status — for a printed worksheet or a message to the team lead.
Does this work on iOS? The staff app is currently Android-only. The web interface works on any browser, including Safari on iPhone, for management functions.
Is the housekeeping module included in the free plan? Housekeeping is part of Zitlin Pro, and every new account gets Pro free for its first 60 days — long enough to put it in front of your cleaning staff and see whether the whiteboard goes away. After that both boards stay readable: every room, every task, who it went to and what got done, because a property that cannot see which rooms are clean cannot run. Changing things is the Pro half — creating and updating tasks, and setting a room's status from the board. A room's condition can still be set one at a time in your room settings, and the front desk, restaurant POS, booking engine and invoicing stay free forever.
Zitlin is not affiliated with Optii, Quore, HotSOS, or any dedicated housekeeping platform. All product names are trademarks of their respective owners.