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Alexander Elchlepp edited this page Aug 22, 2026 · 20 revisions

FewohBee Wiki

FewohBee is a web-based property management system (PMS) for guesthouses, B&Bs, holiday apartments and smaller hotels. Open source, free to use, and running on your own server.

This wiki is the technical documentation: installation, configuration, operation and development. If you are looking for the day-to-day user manual — how to set up your rooms, take reservations, write invoices — that lives on the website: 👉 User manual on fewohbee.app


Contents

The wiki is still growing and content is added step by step. If something important is missing, feel free to open a ticket.


About the application

There is no corporation behind FewohBee, but someone who knows the industry from the inside. I grew up in a guesthouse and ran it myself at times — with everything that comes with it: talking to guests by phone and email, keeping reservations in the booking calendar, invoices, breakfast, room cleaning and accounting.

For a long time much of this was done on paper — with pen, notes and a typewriter, and eventually a PC full of disconnected tools. It cost time every single day, and there was hardly any affordable software that fit a small business. As a software developer I could see the room for improvement, and what existed on the market looked dated and did not meet my expectations.

That is why FewohBee was built: a property management system that genuinely understands the daily routine of a small accommodation. The foundation was laid in 2014, initially just to equip our own guesthouse and find out whether the approach would hold up in practice. It did — the software has been in continuous real-world use ever since. In 2019 the decision followed to release it as open source, because the same problem exists in many other small and medium-sized properties.

Today reservations, confirmations, invoices and accounting all run in one place, reachable from any modern browser on a PC, tablet or smartphone.


Features

🛏️ Reservations & guests

  • Reservation overview — a visual calendar grid to see, create and edit reservations
  • Availability handling — capacity checks, multiple occupancy per room, and room blocks that take a room out of sale entirely (renovation, private use)
  • Guest management — guest profiles with addresses and companies, guest categories for age-dependent pricing, and a GDPR export for individual guests
  • Reservation origins and statuses — track where a booking came from and where it currently stands; both are freely configurable
  • Multiple branches — several properties or subsidiaries in a single installation, with their own rooms, prices and invoice identities

🌐 Online booking

  • Direct booking from your own website — guests book or send a request around the clock; the page can be embedded into an existing site
  • Two modes — a classic search over all accommodations, or a calendar mode where the guest picks the stay directly from the occupancy of a single accommodation
  • Configurable rules — minimum stay, lead time, bookable period and which room types are offered at all
  • Two designsModern and Classic, switchable, with custom CSS supported
  • Abuse protection — rate limiting and bot protection on every public endpoint

🧾 Invoicing & e-invoicing

  • Invoices from reservations with flexible positions, tax rates and payment terms
  • PDF export through fully customizable templates
  • Electronic invoices according to EN 16931, exported as XRechnung (XML) or ZUGFeRD (PDF with embedded XML) — the formats required for B2B invoicing
  • Configurable invoice number ranges, per installation or per branch, with duplicate detection
  • Status tracking across the lifecycle of an invoice

📒 Accounting & payments

  • Booking journal — double-entry bookkeeping tailored to accommodation businesses, with a guided chart of accounts so you do not have to build one from scratch
  • DATEV export for handover to a tax advisor
  • Bank statement import (CSV) — configurable bank profiles for different bank exports, rule-based assignment of transactions, automatic matching against open invoices and duplicate detection on re-import
  • Cash book for cash income and expenses

📋 Daily operations

  • Front desk view — arrivals, departures and current stays of the day at a glance
  • Housekeeping — cleaning lists per room with status tracking, filterable and exportable
  • Operations reports — ready-to-print daily lists based on your own templates

⚡ Automation (workflows)

A rules engine built from three blocks — trigger, condition, action — configured in the UI without writing code.

  • Event-based triggers: new reservation, online booking received, booking imported from a calendar, invoice created, invoice status changed
  • Time-based triggers: a number of days before arrival, after departure, after the invoice date, or on a fixed day each month
  • Conditions narrow down when a rule applies — reservation or invoice status, payment method, whether an email address is present, and more
  • Actions: send a template email (with attachments), change a reservation or invoice status, change the payment method, create a booking journal entry, send an internal notification
  • Every run is logged, and repeated execution on the same record is prevented automatically

✉️ Correspondence & templates

  • Send email directly from the application — confirmations, invoices, pre-arrival information
  • Visual template editor for invoices, confirmations, letters and emails, with a code view for full control over the HTML
  • Template variables with autocomplete and a live preview filled with real example data
  • Separate template types for reservations, invoices, booking journal, GDPR exports, PDF files and operations reports — see Templates

📅 Calendar synchronization

  • iCal/ICS synchronization with booking portals such as Airbnb, Booking.com and others
  • Both directions — publish your own occupancy as a feed, and import external bookings as reservations
  • Per-room feeds with unguessable URLs that can be made public or kept private
  • Runs automatically through scheduled commands

📊 Statistics & reporting

  • Occupancy and utilization statistics across rooms and periods
  • Monthly snapshots for year-over-year comparison
  • Tourist tax (Kurtaxe) calculation and reporting, configurable per branch

⚙️ Administration & security

  • Granular roles — reservations (including a read-only variant), customers, invoices, statistics, cash journal, operations and administration
  • Passkeys / WebAuthn as an alternative or addition to password login
  • Read-only REST API with personal access tokens and scopes; a scope only ever grants what its owner is already allowed to see — see REST API
  • Change logging for security-relevant entities
  • Bilingual — the entire application is available in German and English

Getting started

  1. Check the requirements and the hardware notes.
  2. Install — the Docker setup is the recommended and fastest path.
  3. Work through the configuration.
  4. Set up your property using the user manual on the website.

Prefer not to deal with servers, updates and backups at all? FewohBee Cloud runs the same application as a hosted service — see fewohbee.app.


Contributing

FewohBee is open source under the GPL-3.0. Bug reports, translations, documentation and pull requests are all welcome.

  • Source code and issues: github.com/developeregrem/fewohbee
  • Project conventions — architecture, security, internationalization, testing and code style — are documented in AGENTS.md in the repository root. Read it before opening a pull request; it also works as the instruction file for AI coding agents.
  • Local development setup: Development

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