Why we're building Controlbook

A hotel can spend tens of millions of pounds fitting out its rooms, and receive the record of all that work as a 500-page PDF on opening day. Within months, that document is effectively useless. Nobody updates it. When an item breaks, the person responsible for replacing it often doesn't know what it is, who made it, or what a compliant alternative looks like, so they end up phoning around suppliers from memory or a photo on their phone. Rooms go out of service for days, sometimes weeks, waiting on an answer. Revenue leaks quietly, room by room, and nobody ever puts a number on it because there's no record to measure it against.

I saw the other half of this problem first, building OpenHelm, an agentic browser tool that checks supplier sites and sources alternatives when a product's gone. Hotels kept coming to us with the same request: find out if this chair is still available. The harder question underneath it was never "is it available." It was "what is it, exactly, and where's the paperwork that proves it's compliant." Most of the time, nobody could answer that without digging through a filing cabinet or a scanned PDF nobody had opened in years.

On the other side of the same problem, the interior designers who produce that manual spend weeks assembling it by hand: visiting supplier sites, copying specifications and certificates into spec sheets one product at a time, chasing fire-test paperwork that a supplier promised and never sent. It's skilled, careful work, and almost none of it is designed to survive the handover. The spec sheet gets exported to PDF, emailed to the hotel, and effectively frozen the day the project closes.

We kept noticing that these are the same problem viewed from two ends: a specification that's painstaking to build and immediately stops being useful once it's built. So we're building one platform for both.

The two halves

For hotels, Controlbook turns the static O&M handover into a live, searchable asset database. Report a fault in plain language; the platform identifies the exact item, checks whether it's still available, sources compliant alternatives if it isn't, and drafts the supplier email. A multi-week scramble becomes something closer to an hour. Because every item carries its fire certificate and compliance record, nobody has to hunt through a filing cabinet to prove a replacement is safe.

For design firms, Controlbook replaces the manual spec-building grind. Paste a supplier URL and the platform extracts the product data, compliance certificates and imagery; organise by room type; export the full handover pack in a click. The certificate-chasing that eats a junior designer's week becomes a background check the platform runs for you.

The loop is the point

The reason to do both isn't breadth for its own sake. It's that the designer's output is exactly the hotel's starting data. Every other tool in this space picks one end: design-phase specification tools that stop the day the project closes, or facilities-management platforms that start from a blank asset register and ask the hotel to re-key everything a designer already recorded months earlier. Neither carries the work across the handover.

When a design firm builds the specification on Controlbook and hands the hotel a live record instead of a PDF, the work doesn't die at the seam between design and operations. It carries straight through: the same manufacturer references, the same fire certificates, the same room-by-room structure, now searchable and updatable instead of static. We call that the lifecycle loop, and it's the part no existing tool spans.

Where we are, honestly

We're early. The platform is built and running on real hotel data, including a full ingestion of a working property's O&M manual, several hundred FF&E line items deep, and we're onboarding our first founding hotel groups and design partners now. We'd rather say that plainly than dress it up with logos we haven't earned.

What we've learned so far, building against real manuals rather than sample data: the hard part was never the interface. It was getting extraction accurate enough that a hotel's ops team could trust a match without double-checking it against the original PDF, and getting availability checks fast enough that "is this still made" stops being a multi-day question and becomes a same-day one.

If you run hotels, or you specify their FF&E, we'd like to show you the whole loop on your own data. You can book a demo or read how the platform works.