How to Configure a Floor Plan

Floor Plan configuration drives your community's occupancy tracking in ALIS. Your Floor Plan must be in place before you can assign or reassign residents to rooms, and it is what allows ALIS to track that occupancy data accurately. This guide outlines steps to set up the Floor Plan. 

For setup assistance, contact your Account Manager or our ALIS Customer Success Team. 

Before You Begin

Rooms must exist in the Floor Plan before you can assign them in the Move-In & Community Information section of a resident profile. Build your Floor Plan to match the building's rooms as closely as possible.

Navigate to Communities > Floor Plan. 

Two tabs are essential for floor plan configuration:

• Floor Plan - create, edit, search, and filter rooms.
• Settings - manage room categories, room types, and occupancy settings.

Step 1 - Set up Room Categories and Types (Settings tab)

Open the Settings tab and create your Room Categories and Room Types first.

• Room Category - works like a resident's product type; many communities use it to sort occupancy statistics. Rooms without a category appear as "Uncategorized."
• Room Type - usually the building's room-size offerings. Each type carries an optional Description, Size (sq. ft.), and Market Rate that apply to every room of that type and appear in reports.

💡Manage multiple communities in ALIS? Use the Copy To buttons to push categories and types to other communities for standardization.

Step 2 - Create Rooms (Floor Plan tab)

On the Floor Plan tab, click +Create Rooms and complete the pane:

1. Floor - sorts rooms by floor. Click +Add New and type the floor name (e.g., First Floor). Saved floor names appear in the dropdown for future batches.
2. Hall - sorts rooms by hallway within a floor. Click +Add New and type the hall name (e.g., East Wing). If your halls aren't named, use a generic label such as "Main."
3. Category - select from the categories built in the Settings tab. Applies to all room blocks below.
4. Type - select from the types built in Settings. Applies to all room blocks below.
5. Beds - sets how many beds (units) each room contains. Use the A, B, C, D buttons (A = 1 bed, B = 2, C = 3, D = 4). See Occupancy Terminology and Calculations for how beds affect occupancy calculations.
6. Create room blocks - enter room-number ranges; ALIS creates one room per number in the range.
   • Single room: enter the same number in both fields (e.g., 101 through 101).
   • Multiple rooms: enter a range (e.g., 101 through 120).
   • Skipped numbers: click +Add Another Set to add more ranges (e.g., 101–115, then 117, then 119–120).

Rooms with Letter Prefixes and Suffixes

Some communities split multi-bed or companion rooms into individually lettered rooms (1A, 1B) or use letter-based naming (B2, C1). 

Creating lettered rooms

Room blocks in ALIS accept numbers only at creation. To add a letter, create the room as a number first, then edit it to add the letter to the front or back. 

For example, to end up with rooms 1, 1A, and 1B:

1. Create room block "1 through 1" to add Room 1. Edit Room 1 and add the "A" so it becomes 1A.
2. Create room block "1 through 1" again. Edit that room and add the "B" so it becomes 1B.
3. Create room block "1 through 1" once more and leave it as-is.

You now have all three rooms: 1, 1A, and 1B.

How lettered rooms sort

Rooms display on your Floor Plan tab in intuitive order when names combine numbers and letters:

• [Number][Letter] names (1A, 1B): sort by number then letter, so 1A and 1B precede 2, and multi-digit numbers sort numerically (2, 10, 100). When a number exists both alone and with letters (2, 2A, 2B), the plain number sorts first.
• [Letter][Number] names (B2, C1): sort by letter then number (B2 before B10), with a plain letter ahead of its numbered variants.

Edit rooms

On the Floor Plan tab, edit rooms individually or in bulk.

Single Room

Click the pencil icon at the far right of the room's row. 

Bulk Edit 

Use the checkboxes at the left of each room to multi-select, or use the checkbox beside a Floor or Hall name to select every room in it. The action buttons above the table then become available: 

• Bulk Set - update attributes across all selected rooms.
• Bulk Disable - temporarily remove rooms from the Floor Plan. 
• Bulk Delete - permanently remove rooms (cannot be recovered).
• Migrate Historical Data - reassign room properties from the listed values.
• Reassign Med Carts - reassign residents' Med Carts to the Floor Plan's default carts.

Click Bulk Edit (top right of the table) to open the Edit Rooms page, which lists every room on the selected floor for individual changes. 

Filtering for Live Occupancy Snapshot

Selecting the Hide Applicants checkbox in the filter bar shows current residents and occupants only, giving a live occupancy snapshot. 

Rooms whose only occupant is a filtered-out applicant display as unoccupied. The filter applies to the on-screen view and to PDF/Excel exports, and it stays on as you move between tabs and pages. 

Applicants display by default when the filter is off. (This uses the same applicant definition as occupancy reporting, keeping both consistent.)

Other Settings Considerations

Beyond room categories and types, a few additional settings affect how your Floor Plan and occupancy data behave. The Budget lives on its own tab; the rest are on the Settings tab. 

Budget

The Budget tab lets you track budgeted units (bed/room combinations) per community on a monthly basis. Anyone who can manage the Floor Plan can edit it: click Edit Budget, choose the year, enter values per Room Category per month (use Bulk Set to apply the same number across all months), then Submit Budget.

The Budget doesn't change your actual occupancy; it sets the baseline your occupancy reporting compares against. It feeds the Weekly Occupancy Report, supplying the total monthly Budget and driving the Variance to Budget calculation (daily unit occupancy totals for the month, divided by days in the month, minus that month's Budget). For full detail, see Budget for Floor Plan Units.

Make room assignment required upon move in

When set to Yes, a room assignment becomes a required field to complete the move-in process. Set it to No if your community prefers to allow move-ins without assigning a room first. 

Either way, a room can still be assigned before move-in from the resident profile or during move-in from the Move In modal. See How to Assign a Room for the assignment workflow.

Apply hotel rules for resident move outs

Hotel Rules is a setting applied to your community's occupancy data, on by default. With it enabled, ALIS automatically switches a resident's Financial Move Out Date to the day after the date you select in the Move Out pane, marking the room as occupied for that final day. 

The date you originally selected stays visible and editable in the resident's Move In & Community Information section; the adjusted (day-after) date is what appears at the top of the Moved Out profile and in reports. Editing the original field automatically shifts the reported date to the following day. 

When enabled, your occupancy reports display a Hotel Rules label, and the setting affects:

• Unit Occupancy - move-outs ("-1") register on the Financial Move Out Date; Res Days count through that date.
• Weekly Occupancy - Move Outs (including Range and MTD columns) are based on the Financial Move Out Date.
• Open Room/Bed Census - a room counts as vacant starting the day after the Financial Move Out Date.
• Move Out - honors the Financial Move Out Date shown at the top of resident profiles.

💡A key month-end consideration: a Financial Move Out Date set to the last day of a month shifts to the first day of the next month in reporting. If you run a separate CRM, test for move-out discrepancies, since the two systems may apply hotel rules differently. Full detail is in Hotel Rules and How does 'Hotel Rules' impact the Unit Occupancy Report?.

Hide room changes within room categories on the unit occupancy report

This toggle controls whether mid-stay room changes within the same room category are shown on the Unit Occupancy Report.

Related Articles: 

• Budget for Floor Plan Units
• How to Assign a Room
• Occupancy Terminology and Calculations
• How to Audit Resident Occupancy
• Unit Occupancy Report Guide
• Hotel Rules
• How does 'Hotel Rules' impact the Unit Occupancy Report?

For more assistance: 888.404.ALIS (2547) | support@go-alis.com