Hotel management,
the way your desk actually runs.
Slate runs your whole property from the front-desk PC — bookings, room board, guest folios, GST invoicing, housekeeping, C-Form, payroll and a manager's day sheet. Offline-first, multi-device over your own WiFi, and one flat annual licence with no per-room charge.
Windows and Linux both run the full front-desk system — Linux ships as a .deb or an AppImage, with install commands here. The Android app is a companion to the desk, pairing to your front-desk machine over your own WiFi by scanning a QR at reception.
Enterprise PMS you'll never fully use.
Spreadsheets you shouldn't be using at all.
Most Indian hotels are forced to pick between a heavy enterprise PMS priced for a 200-room chain, or a stack of Excel sheets, WhatsApp groups and Tally entries that falls apart at the first audit. Slate is built for the boutique-to-mid-range property caught in between.
Slate is in trials with a small cohort of Indian boutique and mid-range hotels — running live bookings, check-ins, folios, C-Form filings, night audits and housekeeping schedules. Everything runs on your machine. Nothing is rented monthly. Your data is yours.
Thirty modules. One front desk.
Slate covers the full lifecycle of a hotel — the arrival, the stay, the bill, the compliance paperwork and the manager's morning read. All under one flat annual licence, with nothing held back as a paid add-on.
Front Desk
Every arrival, departure and room on one screen.
- Live room board — colour-coded by occupied, vacant, dirty, arriving today and out-of-order
- Walk-in check-in and advance bookings, with a booking calendar and today's arrivals list
- Room moves mid-stay with available-room lookup
- Checkout preview before you commit — see the full total, then settle
- Hourly and slot stays — configurable slots, live quotes, negotiable overstay charges
- Group bookings with a master folio and per-room allocation
- Per-room stay history — who stayed, when, what they paid
Rates & Revenue
Price the room right, on the right day.
- Rate plans and seasons — set once, applied automatically
- Per-date rate calendar with a full rate grid and preview before publishing
- Live rate quote per room and per date range
- Occupancy forecast based on confirmed bookings
- Revenue reporting by source, with ADR and RevPAR
Billing & Folios
Invoices the auditor accepts and the guest doesn't argue with.
- Guest folio per stay — room charges, F&B, laundry and incidentals, all itemised
- Configurable GST bands for room tariff — set the slabs your property actually falls under
- Discounts with an approval threshold — above your set percentage, it needs a manager
- Charge voids with reason and actor logged; nothing is silently overwritten
- UPI payment QR printed on the bill — guest scans, pays, done
- Branded PDF invoices — your logo, header, footer, terms, bank details and accent colour
- Email the invoice from your own mailbox — connect your SMTP in Settings, no file editing
- Billing register with sequential numbering and a configurable prefix
Guests & CRM
Know the guest before they reach the desk.
- Phone-keyed guest search with full stay history and spend
- VIP flags and blacklist — so the whole team sees the same context
- Internal notes per guest, invisible to the guest
- ID and photo capture — camera, file upload, or a Windows flatbed scanner
- Guest segments for reporting and follow-up
- Pre-arrival check-in — send a link, the guest fills their details, your desk reviews and applies it
Housekeeping & Maintenance
The floor knows what to clean before the desk has to ask.
- Room status tracking — clean, dirty, in progress, inspected, out of order
- Auto-flag on checkout, cleared on inspection
- Task assignment per housekeeper with printable daily lists
- Dedicated mobile view — housekeeping works from a phone, not a printout
- Priority flags for rooms with an arrival due today
- Maintenance log for out-of-order rooms with reason and resolution
- Productivity per staff member — rooms turned, in the manager's report
Compliance
The paperwork Indian hotels legally must do. Handled.
- C-Form / FRRO register for foreign guests — auto-populated from check-in
- Passport and visa scans attached, guest photo printed on the Form C
- CSV export for FRRO submission, with submission tracking
- GSTR-1 export — your return data, straight out of the app
- Tally XML export — hand your accountant a file, not a shoebox
- Audit log — a tamper-visible record of who did what
- Card data never stored — a guard actively rejects card numbers pasted into reference fields, keeping you out of PCI scope by design
Staff, Payroll & F&B
Team management on the same machine as the front desk.
- Six roles — owner, manager, receptionist, housekeeping, F&B, accounts — enforced on the server, not just hidden in the menu
- PIN login with a brute-force lockout ladder
- Attendance with automatic daily fill, so a missed midnight doesn't break the month
- Payroll computed from attendance, salary type and advances
- Salary advances with deduction tracking
- F&B / room-service module — menu, orders, kitchen tickets, settle straight to the guest folio
- Bulk menu import and an F&B sales summary
The Manager's Desk
The numbers a GM actually opens in the morning.
- Day sheet — the whole day on one screen
- Exceptions list — what needs a decision, surfaced instead of buried
- Flash report for a fast read on the day so far
- No-show tracking
- Automated night audit — posts room rent, marks no-shows, snapshots the day
- Shift handover with cash reconciliation
- Twelve reports — revenue, occupancy, arrivals & departures, outstanding dues, GST, P&L, F&B, forecast, audit log and more
The desk serves the whole hotel.
Slate runs on the front-desk PC and serves every other device on your own WiFi. No cloud subscription in the middle, no monthly per-device fee.
Front-desk PC
The main terminal. Holds the database, serves everything else, works with the internet unplugged.
Android app
Scan a QR at reception and the phone pairs itself. Housekeeping and room board in a pocket.
Any tablet or PC
Installable web app on any browser on the network. Nothing to buy, nothing to license per seat.
Zero-config discovery
Devices find the desk automatically on the network. No IP addresses to type, no router settings to learn.
Hotel operations don't pause for software problems.
Slate is engineered around a working front desk — power cuts, patchy internet, a new receptionist on the night shift, and guests who don't wait while the system thinks about it.
WORK OFFLINE
30 RETAINED
REPLACED DATABASE
LEAVE THE PROPERTY
Two ways to run Slate on Linux.
This is the front-desk machine — install it once on the PC that will hold your property's data. On Ubuntu, Debian or Mint, use the .deb. On anything else, use the AppImage. Phones and tablets don't need either; they connect to this machine over your own WiFi.
.deb package
Ubuntu · Debian · Linux Mint · Pop!_OS · elementary
01Download the package.
02Install it, pulling in anything else it needs.
03Start it — from your applications menu, or here.
To remove it later: sudo apt remove slate
AppImage
Fedora · Arch · openSUSE · anything else
01Download it.
02Mark it executable. Linux won't run a downloaded file until you allow it.
03Run it. One file, nothing installed.
To remove it later: delete the file.
Slate serves your property over your own network, so the front-desk machine needs port 3000 open on the local network. The Windows installer does this for you; on Linux you may need to allow it once:
After that, any phone or tablet on the same WiFi reaches it at http://slate.local:3000, and the Android app pairs by scanning the QR shown at reception. Nothing is exposed to the public internet.
On Ubuntu 22.04 and newer you may see an error mentioning libfuse.so.2 — those releases stopped shipping FUSE 2, which AppImages rely on. Either:
Or install the library once and run it normally afterwards:
On a Debian-family system the simpler answer is the .deb, which has no such dependency. Not sure which Linux you're on? Run cat /etc/os-release | head -2.
What's built but not switched on yet.
We'd rather tell you what's coming than let you find out it isn't here. These are finished or near-finished, and waiting on something other than code.
Channel manager
Built for major OTAs like Booking.com, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Agoda and Expedia. It's currently in testing and partnership approval, and will switch on in a future update once those integrations are certified and the commercial agreements are in place.
Owner dashboard
A read-only mobile dashboard for revenue, occupancy, expenses and staff — so an owner can watch the property without touching the front desk or exposing the guest database. Built and rolling out shortly.
One thing worth knowing up front: the Windows installer isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may show a "publisher unknown" warning the first time you run it. It's safe to proceed — and we're sorting the certificate. The Linux AppImage and the Android app install without that warning.
Install, onboard, take your first booking —
in an evening.
No IT department. No cloud contract. No integration project. Slate installs on the front-desk machine and stays out of your way after.
Download & install — free for 14 days
One installer for Windows, or an AppImage for Linux. The full product is unlocked for two weeks — no card, no lock-in, no crippled features. Add the Android app to any phones you want on it.
Guided onboarding wizard
Property details, GSTIN, room types, rooms, tariff, owner PIN and terms — configured in a step-by-step flow that creates your first account as it goes. An in-app tutorial then walks your team through the room board.
Free staff training
A live walkthrough with your front desk, housekeeping and back office. Every user gets a PIN and the right role, and enough muscle memory to work fast on a real shift.
It just runs
Updates download in the background and apply when you quit — never mid-shift. Backups run daily on their own. Support is a direct WhatsApp line, not a ticketing queue.
One flat fee. Nothing hidden.
One licence, per property, per year. Not per room. Not per terminal. Not a monthly SaaS bill. Try it free for two weeks first — you only pay if it earns its place at your front desk.
- 14-day free trial · no card, no lock-in
- Unlimited rooms, bookings, guests, staff and devices on your network
- Front desk, rates, groups, hourly stays, folios and GST invoicing
- Housekeeping, maintenance, C-Form, GSTR-1 and Tally export
- Staff attendance, payroll, F&B module and 12 reports
- Android app and installable web app on any device you own
- Daily automatic backups with a recoverable restore
- Silent auto-updates and a direct WhatsApp support line
₹1,500 off for every hotel you refer
Refer another hotel that signs up for Slate and you get a flat ₹1,500 off — credited immediately, not held until renewal. Stackable across multiple referrals.
T&C — Discount applies to the referring hotel, credited on the referred hotel's paid sign-up. The referred hotel pays the standard ₹12,000/year and can then refer their own hotels on the same terms.
The full TBN hotel stack
Already running Folio for room-service billing? Slate slots in beside it — Folio keeps the F&B tabs, Slate takes the front desk. One team, one support line, one way of working.
Questions hotels ask before signing.
What actually happens during the 14-day free trial?
Does Slate really work offline?
How does the Android app work?
How do I install Slate on Linux?
sudo apt install ./Slate-Linux.deb. On any other distribution, download the AppImage, run chmod +x Slate-Linux.AppImage to mark it executable, then ./Slate-Linux.AppImage. You'll also want to allow port 3000 on the local network with sudo ufw allow 3000/tcp so phones and tablets can reach the desk — the Windows installer does this automatically, Linux needs the one command. Full instructions are in the install section above.The Linux AppImage won't start — it mentions libfuse.so.2
./Slate-Linux.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run, or install the library once with sudo apt install libfuse2. On a Debian-family system the simpler answer is the .deb, which has no such dependency.