Reference data

Who this is for: Owner and Manager — editing a list needs reference.manage. Everyone else meets these lists as dropdowns, wherever they are used. Where: Settings → Reference Data

Reference data is the set of small controlled vocabularies the rest of Nerve picks from: the identity documents your front desk accepts, how a guest is addressed, what a phone number is for, which market a booking is counted under. They live in Settings › Reference Data, and every one of them is yours to edit.

One screen for every list, and one menu entry — not one per vocabulary. A list added in a later release appears here without moving anything you already know.

Nerve ships each list with a starting vocabulary so nothing has to be configured before you can take a booking. What you change on top of that — a rename, a new entry, a different order, an entry you no longer offer — belongs to your organisation alone and never touches anybody else's.

What the lists drive#

List	Where it shows up	What breaks if it is wrong
ID document types	The guest profile's identity documents	A clerk records a passport as "Other", and your statutory guest report cannot tell document types apart
Titles	Guest profile, registration cards, correspondence	Letters go out addressed wrongly, or with no salutation at all
Nationalities	Guest profile, statutory guest reporting	Nationality counts are incomplete, which is the one field the reporting is built around
Source regions	Guest profile, source-of-business analysis	Market performance splits across two entries that mean the same thing
Contact types	Each address and number on a guest	An invoice goes to a personal address, or a wake-up call to the office line

The Titles list, where it is actually met. Editing the list changes this dropdown for everyone at the property immediately — there is no release to wait for.

The list screen#

Every list opens onto the same screen, so learning one teaches you all of them.

Name is what people read, Code is what records store, and Origin says where the entry came from — "Built in" for one Nerve shipped, blank for one your property invented.

Renaming is not the same as adding#

Every entry has two parts: a name, which is what people read, and a code, which is what Nerve stores on the record.

Renaming changes the name and keeps the code. Every guest, folio and report already filed under that entry keeps pointing at it, and simply reads differently from now on. This is what you want when the product's wording is not your house's wording.

The code field is deliberately locked. Records already store it, so changing it would orphan every one of them.

Adding a near-duplicate entry does something quite different: it creates a second code that means the same thing. From that moment your reports split — some records under one, some under the other — and no amount of renaming afterwards puts them back together.

Important

If the entry already exists and you dislike its wording, rename it. Add a new entry only when you genuinely offer something the list does not cover.

Retiring is not deleting#

When you stop offering something — a document type your jurisdiction no longer accepts, a market segment you have folded into another — retire it. A retired entry:

• disappears immediately from every dropdown, so nobody can choose it again;
• stays on every record that already references it, and still reads with its proper name.

Retired entries stay on this screen, greyed and badged, with a Restore if you switch it back on. They are gone from the dropdowns and nowhere else.

That second half is why Nerve has no delete. A guest checked in three years ago against a document type is a fact about that stay, and erasing the vocabulary entry would leave the record pointing at nothing.

Order#

Use the arrow to move an entry up. The order you set is the order every dropdown in the product uses, so put the two or three entries your desk picks ninety percent of the time at the top. Lists with no natural order — the nationalities, for instance — read alphabetically in the reader's own language until you pin something above them.

Language#

Every built-in entry is translated into each language Nerve supports, so a colleague working in Bahasa Indonesia sees the list in Bahasa Indonesia without anybody translating anything.

An entry you add is stored exactly as you typed it and shows the same way to everyone, in every language — Nerve will not machine-translate your own vocabulary. If you need a house entry to read differently per language, add it in the language your team works in and treat it as a house term.

Renaming a built-in entry replaces it in all languages, for the same reason.

Who can change this#

Permission	Lets you	Held by default
reference.manage	Add, rename, reorder, retire and restore entries in every list	Manager, Owner
—	Read a list as a dropdown, wherever it is used	Anyone who can already see the record it sits on

Reading a list is not a special privilege: if you may see a guest, you see the guest's dropdowns, because otherwise the screen could not render.

If Reference Data does not appear in your Settings menu, your role does not hold reference.manage; an owner or manager can grant it under Settings › Roles.

What's next#

• Guest profile details — the profile screen these lists feed
• Charge codes, tax and billing setup — the other master data a property configures once