Check Little Hotelier arrivals and unpaid balances daily

1. Open My Apps > Front Desk > Reservations, set Date type to Check-in date, enter today and tomorrow in Date from and Date to, set Status to Confirmed and click Search.
2. Read the Room column: a booking without a room sits in the blue Unallocated row of the Front Desk Calendar and needs a room before the guest arrives.
3. Read the Outstanding column, then open each booking with a balance and check its Payments tab for deposits and recorded payments.
4. Read the reference prefix (BDC for Booking.com, EXP for Expedia, ABB for Airbnb, AGO for Agoda) to see where the booking came from before chasing the guest.
5. For a hotel-collect balance, open the reservation and click Send Payment Request (Little Hotelier Pay only), or note it for the desk.
6. The search, the clicks into each booking and the payment check repeat every morning, and one missed balance becomes an awkward conversation at check-in.

Who checks in today and tomorrow, which room do they have, and which bookings still owe money?

1. 01

   Pull the arrival window

   The agent calls list_reservations with date_type check_in for today and tomorrow and status confirmed, so cancelled and already checked-in stays stay out of the list. It follows the cursor to the last page on busy weekends.

2. 02

   Put roomless bookings first

   Rows with no room go to the top of the report with room type and arrival time. The agent does not choose a room itself; allocation stays with you on the Calendar.

3. 03

   Open only bookings that owe money

   For rows where outstanding is above zero it calls get_reservation and compares the invoice total with recorded payments, so a deposit taken at booking is shown as part paid. Rows at zero are never opened.

4. 04

   Split the balances by who collects

   Bookings with an LH reference are listed as amounts for you to collect. Channel bookings (BDC, EXP, AGO, ABB) with a balance are marked "check payment model", because a Little Hotelier payment request cannot be sent on channel-collect or channel virtual card bookings.

5. 05

   Add what reception needs

   Guest comments and the arrival time go next to each balance, so a late arrival with an unpaid stay is visible before the desk closes. Nothing in Little Hotelier is changed by the run.

Arrivals Mon 12 Oct: 5 confirmed, 1 without a room
No room: BDC-6012874 Sofia Ricci, Double Room, ETA 21:30
To collect: LH48213 Marta Kowal, EUR 240.00 outstanding, nothing paid, "late arrival around 18:00"
To collect: LH48241 Tom Hale, EUR 60.00 left after a EUR 120.00 deposit
Check payment model: EXP-88231 Ana Ruiz, EUR 310.00 shown outstanding on an Expedia booking
Tomorrow: 7 arrivals, 2 with a balance, every room assigned

• Little Hotelier's Reservations search shows only the first 31 days of results when the date fields are left blank; the CSV export holds the full set, up to 365 days per export.
• A Little Hotelier Pay payment request link stays valid for 48 hours and works only on hotel-collect reservations, never on channel-collect or channel virtual card bookings.
• Little Hotelier Automated payments schedules one payment per reservation, ignores reservations made before a rule was created, and schedules nothing new when a refund leaves a balance.
• Little Hotelier shows confirmed bookings with no room in blue in the Unallocated row of the Front Desk Calendar, and a light grey block is a booking still being made with an incomplete payment.

Every tool here only reads, so it can run daily from n8n, Make, Zapier or cron without waiting for your OK.

Sources: Little Hotelier Help: Run and export reservations information · Little Hotelier Help: Payment requests · Little Hotelier Help: Automated payments FAQ · Little Hotelier Help: Getting started with reservations

curl https://cotlet.dev/api/v1/little-hotelier/list_reservations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COTLET_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"date_type":"check_in","from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-13","status":"confirmed"}'

{
  "reservations": [
    {
      "reservation_id": "LH48213",
      "status": "confirmed",
      "guest": "Marta Kowal",
      "source": "Booking.com",
      "occupants": "2 adults",
      "check_in": "2026-10-12",
      "check_out": "2026-10-14",
      "booked": "2026-09-02",
      "room": "Double 3",
      "total": "240.00",
      "outstanding": "240.00",
      "currency": "EUR"
    },
    {
      "reservation_id": "LH48230",
      "status": "confirmed",
      "guest": "Liam Byrne",
      "source": "Direct Booking",
      "occupants": "1 adult",
      "check_in": "2026-10-12",
      "check_out": "2026-10-13",
      "booked": "2026-10-05",
      "room": null,
      "total": "95.00",
      "outstanding": "0.00",
      "currency": "EUR"
    }
  ],
  "next_cursor": null
}

MCP: add https://cotlet.dev/mcp/v1 with the same key; the tool is little-hotelier_list_reservations. Example data.

• Bulk update Little Hotelier rates with an AI agent
• Set Little Hotelier minimum stay and CTA with an AI agent
• Reply to Little Hotelier guest messages with an AI agent
• Little Hotelier API and MCP server: every tool
• All use cases