In 5 years we’ll expect to be able to handle everything from our phone

In our personal lives we are already more or less dependent on our smartphones. They carry all our contact information, our music library, all our photos and entertainment, we use them to book travels, check our bank statement, pay bills, send emails, shop and endless of other areas.

Our behavior and habits in our personal life also affects what tools we want in our work. And in many ways business management has fallen behind.

Jump on the train or get left behind

Björn Milton, founder of the hotel management app Roombler, is convinced that going mobile is the only way to go and that companies that won’t jump on this train will fall behind in this new paradigm.

”In 5 years we’ll expect to be able to handle everything from our phone. It will be essential when choosing a new system for any part of your business. This is how we decided to go mobile.”

However you shouldn't use a mobile solution for the sake of mobile. You should use a mobile solution because of the benefits it will bring. So let us take a look at what benefits our customers points out with Roombler.

Easy to learn. Easy to use.

The number one problem with many of the other solutions available is that they are extremely complex and notoriously hard to learn and use. We believe that everybody can, and should, use a system to manage their accommodation business. Even the smallest ones with one or two units.

There is no reason anybody should be forced to use pen and paper anymore. If they don't want to. The number 1 reason we see for not using any system at all is that people don't know what they need and they feel that spending all that time trying to learn something that should be natural and easy is just not worth it.

Mobile gives us as developers a very constrained environment that forces us to hide all the complexities. This is why Roombler is very easy to learn and use.

Always in your pocket

Remember a time when Facebook was still a browser only experience? We bet that you didn't use it very often, maybe checked on it a couple of times each week.

We also remember when they decided that mobile was going to be their future. Suddenly Facebook was right there in our phones, giving us notifications whenever something happened. This was a fundamental shift for Facebook, and for us as Facebook users. These days you most likely check Facebook many times each day. It has become part of many people's daily routine.

This is why we are certain that business (enterprise and small alike) software is going in the same direction. And especially for small business owners. The business you run is very much a part of your life, so why wouldn't you have an app that tells you each time something is going on. Each time a new reservation has been made, each time someone checks in and so on. An app where you at any time can perform crucial business operations.

Let everybody play

Today virtually everybody have a mobile device. So by using a mobile approach to managing your accommodation business, means it is much easier to let everybody in on the fun (and the boring).

One of the most common situations we see is that you are a couple of people running the business. But in almost every case only one person is responsible for managing bookings. This is because most systems (including pen and paper) is surprisingly single user centric. Even if you use a digital system, only one person "owns" the booking calendar. This is strange and certainly not optimal.

Using Roombler lets everybody make business critical operations, not leaving different parts of the business management to only one person.

Going mobile isn’t enough

Now, the traits described above is of course traits of Roombler, not something that automagically appears in any system just because it is mobile. But we believe that by going mobile we have been forced to think hard around a lot of different areas. And the ones above are some of those.