Owner quick start guide
This guide covers everything you need to get your property fully set up on Yado: creating your account, adding rooms, inviting staff, and configuring the handful of property-wide settings.
On this page
1. Getting into your account
You'll receive a registration link by email when Yado is set up for your property (or when an existing owner adds you to a second property). Following that link takes you to a registration page where you set your name and password — your email is already attached to the invite, so there's nothing to mix up there.
Once registered, sign in any time at yado.ca. If you ever forget your password, use the Forgot password? link on the sign-in page — it's self-serve, sends a reset link to your email, and doesn't require anyone else to intervene.
As the owner, you have full administrator access plus a couple of owner-only abilities — mainly, only you can grant or change another administrator's access to a property. Day to day, your Admin Panel looks identical to any other administrator's.
2. Setting up your rooms
Open the Admin Panel from the account menu, then the Rooms tab — this is the default tab, so it's the first thing you'll see.
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Add each room
Use the add-room field to create a room entry — typically just a room number or name (e.g. "12" or "Cabin 3"). Add rooms one at a time; there's no bulk import, but for a typical small property this only takes a couple of minutes.
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Put them in order
Rooms can be reordered so they appear on the grid in the sequence that makes sense for your property — usually matching your building layout or numbering.
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Deactivate rooms you're not using yet
If a room is out of service or not ready to go live, you can toggle it inactive rather than deleting it. Inactive rooms drop off the daily grid but keep their history and can be reactivated later.
3. Inviting staff
Still in the Admin Panel, switch to the Staff tab.
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Generate an invite link
Click Invite staff, enter the person's email address, and choose their role — Housekeeper, Front Desk, Supervisor, or Administrator. A one-time link is generated, valid for 7 days.
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Copy and send the link
Use the Copy link button and send it to them however's easiest — text, email, whatever works. If you close the invite window before copying it, or need to grab it again later, it's still sitting in the Pending invites list on the Staff tab with its own Copy link button.
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They register, and they're in
The link takes them to a short registration page. Once they set a password, they can sign in immediately with the role you assigned. If it turns out you picked the wrong role, or plans change, you can revoke a pending invite from the same list before it's used.
- Housekeeper — sees only the rooms scheduled for service that are assigned to them, or unassigned. Marks rooms clean/fixed, adds notes and photos.
- Front Desk — sees the full grid, assigns cleans/fixes to any room, handles guest flags like late checkout, add room specific notes for housekeeping staff.
- Supervisor — everything Front Desk can do, generally used for a lead housekeeper or shift lead.
- Administrator — full access to the Admin Panel: rooms, staff, settings and reports.
Changing someone's role, deactivating them, or (if they work across more than one of your properties) adjusting which properties they can access, is all done from the same Staff tab — click on the staff member to open their settings.
4. Property settings
The Settings tab holds a small number of property-wide options:
- Property name — shown throughout the app and in staff emails.
- Timezone — this determines which calendar date a room's activity is recorded under, so it matters more than it might seem. Pick the timezone your property is actually in; the dropdown shows the current UTC offset and a live "current time there" preview next to it so you can double check you've got the right one before saving.
- Room grid direction — whether the room grid fills row by row or column by column. This is purely a display preference — pick whichever reads more naturally for how you scan the board.
If you change the timezone, do it at the start of a day rather than partway through — switching mid-day can shift which day today's activity is recorded under.
5. Using the room grid day to day
As an owner/administrator, your day-to-day view of the grid works the same as Front Desk's — see the Front Desk guide for the full walkthrough of room states, assigning cleans/fixes, and flags. The Reports tab in the Admin Panel gives you a day-by-day summary you can pull up for any date.
6. Managing more than one property
If you own more than one property on Yado, a Switch Property option appears in your account menu, letting you jump between them without signing out.
Staff can also work across more than one of your properties — from the Staff tab, open a staff member's Properties button (only shown if you have more than one property) to grant or revoke their access to each one individually, with a separate role per property if you need it. Each property has a limit on how many staff can be granted access to it; the modal will show you if a property's at its limit.
What's next
Once rooms and staff are set up, day-to-day operations mostly live with your Front Desk team and housekeepers. Worth a skim through their guides so you know what they're seeing: