Room states: six of them, and why readiness is never switched by hand
What each of a room's six states means, the order they are chosen in, and why no role — the owner included — has a ‘Ready’ switch.
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‘Clean, dirty, inspected’ — the three words a room is usually described with. They do not answer the question anybody is actually asking: can the next guest be let in.
ATQAR has six states, and every one of them is an answer to that single question.
The six states
Occupied
Blocked. There is unresolved work holding the room: a fault, a repair, anything with a reason on it. Until that is cleared by a decision, nothing else matters.
Check-out not confirmed. The room has no preparation cycle running right now: either there has been no cycle yet, or the last cycle was invalidated as an error or a duplicate. The room is neither in progress nor ready: it is unknown, and saying so is more honest than guessing.
Awaiting cleaning. The departure is confirmed and the main cleaning exists, but it has neither run nor been accepted yet. It may have no assignee — when planning found no free hour in the roster, the cleaning waits for assignment. The created cleaning itself is enough for the room’s state: it does not depend on the assignee.
Cleaning in progress. The employee has started.
Awaiting review. The work has been handed in and is waiting for independent review. The room is not ready yet — and this is where ‘cleaned’ and ‘ready’ stop being the same thing.
Ready. The cleaning has been accepted and nothing is holding the room.
The order matters more than the list
A room shows exactly one state — the first one that matches, in the order above.
So a blocked room stays blocked even once its cleaning has been accepted: the fault comes first. And a room whose cleaning has not been accepted does not become ready because somebody is very busy.
First match is what makes a state unambiguous. An unordered list would let a room be ‘being cleaned’ and ‘blocked’ at the same time, and two people would have to decide which of the two was true.
Nobody has the switch
Not the housekeeper, not the technician, not the administrator, not the owner. Readiness is derived from accepted work, and that is the only way it is ever arrived at.
The reason is simple. A manual switch makes a room’s state somebody’s assertion rather than a consequence of the work — and on the first hard day somebody will flip it, because ‘I know that room is fine’. After that the state can never be trusted again, and being trustworthy is the entire reason it exists.
Occupied
A blocked room always names its reason. The block is cleared by a decision with a reason, not by deleting the task: a deleted task would take with it the fact that the fault ever happened.
What an employee sees
Their own work, not a directory of properties. The full list of rooms, their readiness, notes and stays are available to the owner and to administrators. A housekeeper or a technician reporting a problem picks a room from a separate minimal list: property and room only, with no guest, no stay, no note and none of anybody else’s tasks.
More: Room states, Preparation cycles and corrections, Properties and rooms.