From a manual tracker to automated dunning for Apaleo
GoClearBalance didn't start in a pitch deck. It started in a hotel finance team — as a feature inside a different product, built to patch a gap nobody else had filled. Four years later, it has grown into a dedicated platform, live at our first pilot customer.
How we got here
Six moments that shape this product.
Moving a hotel company onto Apaleo
Stefan, then working at a hotel company, led their migration from a legacy PMS to Apaleo. The appeal was simple: an API-first platform meant the hotel could finally build its own tools instead of waiting on the PMS vendor to ship them. One piece was still missing — a dunning system for overdue guest balances.
A manual dunning tracker, inside GIMSI
To fill the gap, Stefan added a manual dunning feature to GIMSI — his first SaaS for Apaleo hotels. Not automation: a place to see every overdue case in one view, so nothing fell through the cracks on Monday mornings. GIMSI runs at 27+ Apaleo properties today, and that dunning module is still used every week.
The case for full automation
Three years of watching hotels run manual dunning made one thing clear: writing the letters isn't the hard part. The spreadsheets, miscalculated fees, forgotten follow-ups, and missing audit trails around them are. A tracker inside another product couldn't solve that. A purpose-built automation platform could.
PRD, architecture, build
Stefan drafted the PRD after customer interviews, designed a multi-tenant architecture that isolates each hotel's data in its own database, and started shipping. Pilot #1 — the same hotel company that moved to Apaleo four years earlier — signed on as the first customer.
Pilot #1 live
GoClearBalance is running pilot #1's daily dunning now. Open balances get picked up automatically. Notices go out with one-click payment links. Every action — and every skipped case — is logged. What used to take a Monday morning takes a glance at the case list.
Apaleo App Store and general availability
Customer success story from pilot #1, then Apaleo App Store listing, then general availability. A second pilot partner is welcome between now and then — the earlier you come in, the more of the roadmap you shape.
Why we built it
Manual dunning isn't a small problem. For most hotels, it's one or two people's worst morning of the week — a task that gets postponed, delegated, redone, and still costs money the business never sees back.
It isn't just an efficiency problem, either. Wrong fees on notices create legal exposure. Letters sent to guests who already paid damage the relationship. Missing audit trails turn routine compliance questions into small crises. Every part of the process carries risk a spreadsheet cannot manage.
GoClearBalance exists because that risk is avoidable. The Apaleo API exposes everything needed to automate the work, close the loop with guests, and keep a complete audit trail. The gap was simply that nobody had built a product focused on it. We have.
Who builds it
Stefan Wölflinger — founder
Four years building against the Apaleo OpenAPI, and more than five years in hospitality tech before that. Engineer first; SaaS builder second. GoClearBalance is his third product for Apaleo hotels, after GIMSI (offers, reservations, operations) and BMD Connector (accounting integration for Austrian hotels).
LinkedInHoTechOlution — the company
HoTechOlution is the company behind GIMSI, BMD Connector, and GoClearBalance. Based in Vienna, Austria. Deliberately small — every product is shipped and maintained by the people who built it. No account managers, no outsourced support tiers: when you write in, Stefan replies.
What's next
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Pilot #2 — we're actively looking for one more hotel partner between now and the Apaleo App Store listing.
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Customer success story from pilot #1, with real numbers — published around three months from now.
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Apaleo App Store listing — shortly after the success story, making GoClearBalance available to every Apaleo hotel with one click.
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General availability — Q4 2026, all features stable, onboarding self-serve, and pricing locked for early adopters.
Ready to take a look?
Start a free trial, or book 20 minutes to talk through a pilot. Either way, GoClearBalance is live and we're ready to show it.