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Oracle Opera Integration

Updated

With our Oracle Opera integration, you can easily post room charges into Opera and optionally post all revenue and receipts as well.

Our integration supports Opera v5.x and later. You can get a quote from your local Opera vendor for our IF8 Interface with the part number IO-5004-301 or L107132.

  • This interface is available for use and is currently in beta.

Room Charges

Once an invoice is saved in ChiDesk, instead of recording a receipt, users can choose to Post the charge against a customer account in Opera. The customer can be identified via their room number.

  1. Create a new Invoice.
  2. Add a Room charge receipt for the full amount to balance off the client account. This receipt is not posted to the PMS and is purely to balance the account in ChiDesk.
  3. Click Save.
  4. Browse to the Details tab and enter either a room number or name in the Room field.
  5. Click Post.
  6. A new window will appear displaying any customer accounts found in Opera.
  7. Click the required name to post the room charges to this account.
  • If you need to adjust an invoice that has already been posted to Opera, simply click the Unpost button. This will reverse the posted charges by posting a negative value for each charge against the customer account in Opera.
  • Gratuities must be added to the Invoice itself in order to properly reflect on room charges. Click Add Custom, choose the Gratuity type and add the amount to the invoice items itself.

Non Room Revenue

You can optionally choose to post all invoices and that are not room charges into Opera, along with any direct receipts. These are posted as receipts into Opera and are split proportionately based on the revenue items that the receipt is settling.

Posting Revenue

  1. Create a new Cash Balance for the day.
  2. Click Save.
  3. Click the Post button to post all receipts for the cash balance period into Opera.
  • Once a cash balance has been posted, any adjustments to documents in this date range must be manually removed from Opera in order to post the cash balance period again.

Limitations

When posting Course sales you can choose to post these against a liability account in Opera. However, Course Redemptions must be allocated manually each month as these do not raise a receipt in ChiDesk and therefore cannot be posted to Opera as part of the Cash Balance.

Getting Started

In order to communicate with Opera the required modules must be setup and configured by your local Opera representative. We will work with them to setup the various settings for the interface.

Remote Connection Setup

Opera is generally installed on-premise and consequently in order to communicate with Protel, ChiDesk requires a remote connection to be setup at the Opera site. This is normally handled by the internal IT support at the hotel. Please instruct them to setup a static public IP address that we can point to, along with port-forwarding to a computer on which we can install the SpaGuru Opera interface application.

  • The SpaGuru Opera interface which runs as a .NET console application on this machine and communicates with Opera. This can be on any computer provided it can communicate with the main Opera server.

Opera Setup

Opera allows you to categorize posted sales in up to 4 categories as defined below:

  • Sub Total 1: Services, Memberships and Other sales.
  • Sub Total 2: Retail Sales
  • Sub Total 3: Voucher Sales. This should be a non-revenue account.
  • Sub Total 4: Course Sales
  • Tips: Gratuities.

The Payment Method for Room Charges should be set to 16 and the Revenue Centre should be set to 1. Non-room charges will use Payment Method 99.

Opera supports the following receipt types and mappings:

  • Cash: 1
  • Credit Card: 2
  • Electronic: 3
  • Cheque: 4
  • Voucher: 5

If the above defaults are not sufficient you can set a specific payment type to use by opening each Payment Type in ChiDesk and setting the Account Code here. This can be necessary if you need to track credit card receipts by type, such as Visa, Mastercard etc.

ChiDesk Setup

Once you have completed all the required Opera setup steps you can open ChiDesk and navigate to Settings - Hotel Integration.

  1. Set the Type to Opera.
  2. In the Address field enter your full remote address that points to the machine on which the SpaGuru Opera application is running.
  3. Tick Post Receipts if you want to post direct receipts.
  4. Tick Post All Sales if you want to post all revenue.

Once all the above is done you can see if the connection is working by saving your changes and then following the steps listed under the Room Charges section to create a new Invoice and attempt to post it.

Troubleshooting

Some common errors and how to resolve them.

  • You receive the below error when attempting to post an invoice or cash balance: This request operation sent to net.tcp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:8732/OperaInterface did not receive a reply within the configured timeout (00:01:00).  The time allotted to this operation may have been a portion of a longer timeout.  This may be because the service is still processing the operation or because the service was unable to send a reply message.  Please consider increasing the operation timeout (by casting the channel/proxy to IContextChannel and setting the OperationTimeout property) and ensure that the service is able to connect to the client.
  1. First thing to check is that the ChiDesk Opera middleware application is running. Log on to the server hosting the application, this is normally the Opera interface server. Check if the application is running as a service by opening services.msc and finding an entry for ChiDesk Opera Interface. If the entry exists and is stopped, start the service. If the entry does not exist, then the interface is setup to run in console mode and must be manually started. Check the taskbar to ensure no instance of ChiDesk.Opera are running. Double-click the ChiDesk.Opera icon on the desktop to startup the console application. Make sure the LinkDescription shows as successfully received. Retry the action from ChiDesk to see if it works. If running in console mode you will see a log of every action written to the console as it happens. This will allow you to identify if calls are making it to the middleware application.
  2. If the application is running successfully, but the issue persists then the firewall needs to be checked to ensure requests are not being blocked, and that they are being forwarded to the server hosting the ChiDesk Opera middleware application. If running in console mode, you can see if the request is being received by the middleware by checking if any output is written when performing tasks from ChiDesk, like checking for guests etc.
  • The ChiDesk Opera application depends on two Opera services to also be running. The Ifc8Service (SPG.xml) and the Opera IFC Controlller. Make sure both these services are both Started as well.

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