The WhatsApp of your university hall, your campus residence, your front desk, your Erasmus students, answered.

First Monday in February, nine at night. Fourteen second-semester students have arrived: three ask in English for the wifi password, one asks in Italian what time reception closes and another sends a photo of a dripping radiator. There is one person on reception until ten; maintenance belongs to a company that starts at eight, and cleaning to another one. Bedel is the one answering that WhatsApp: it settles what repeats from what the residence has written down, opens the radiator ticket with its deadline for the contractor and leaves on a person's phone what a machine should not decide.

What it is and what it is not. Bedel is support and communication software for the day-to-day of a university residence. It is not the application system for places, nor the university's management system: it does not allocate rooms, does not charge and does not control access. Nor does it replace management or the university's housing office: what is not its to handle, it passes to a person, with the conversation in front of them, and leaves it in writing.

What the resident writes: "I arrive on Sunday at 11 pm. Is reception still open?"

What Bedel does: Answers in English with the opening hours the residence has written down. If nothing says what to do with a late arrival, it does not make it up: it passes it to the right person according to the org chart

What the resident writes: "When does the call for places for next year open?"

What Bedel does: Answers with the text the residence has prepared for when there are places and for when there are none, sends the information document if there is one and puts whoever asked on the dashboard's list of applicants. It allocates nothing

What the resident writes: A photo of a dripping radiator in room 318

What Bedel does: Opens a maintenance ticket with category and urgency and notifies the maintenance post, even if it is an outside company's technician with their own WhatsApp. The resident knows when it is accepted and when it is closed

What the resident writes: "Please don't clean my room tomorrow, I have an exam at nine"

What Bedel does: Logs the request for that day and sends it to whoever cleans, with the room number. If the cleaning post has working hours and the message comes in outside them, it is held and reaches them when they start

What the resident writes: "I'm going home from 20 December to 8 January"

What Bedel does: Logs it in the absence log, one row per night. The evacuation plan does not count someone who is away, and on the morning they are due back it asks "Arriving today?" with two buttons

What the resident writes: "Can I book the study room on Thursday from 6 to 8 pm?"

What Bedel does: Books in slots with the capacity and the weekly cap per person the residence sets; if it is already full in exam week, it says why it does not fit

What the resident writes: "I want to tell someone about something that happened on my floor and I don't know who"

What Bedel does: Takes it through the confidential channel, right there or on the residence's own form, anonymous by default. The account is encrypted and every reading is logged

In a university residence the in-house staff is usually small (management, someone in administration and reception) and maintenance and cleaning are run by a company under contract. Bedel does not notify a group: it uses the org chart and shifts the residence configures, and that org chart has room for outside people with their own WhatsApp.

• A post is a group of people with their phones, whoever pays them: the contractor's technician gets the ticket with the photo and accepts or closes it with buttons.
• Urgent matters go to the whole post; the rest, to the first person in that shift's rotation. If nobody picks it up, it goes up to the area lead and then to management.
• Each post can have its own working hours. What arrives while the contractor is not working and can wait is held in a queue the dashboard shows, and delivered when they start.
• Reception talks to the resident from the same number and sends announcements to the whole house or to one floor by room range. What the team writes goes out as written, untranslated.

A university residence does not fill up once. It fills up in September and fills up again halfway through the year, when the first-semester exams end and the exchange students arrive (those on Erasmus and on other agreements) who only come for half the academic year. Every intake brings the same questions, and every departure leaves a bed that should be counted as free on the right day, not a week later.

• The resident list is uploaded in whatever spreadsheet you already keep, with the columns named however they are named: besides name, phone and room, it takes the day each person starts living there and the last day they spend in the house.
• Whoever arrives in February does not count in the evacuation plan (nor in the kitchen, if there is a dining hall) until their first day; whoever leaves in January stops counting the day after their last.
• If you keep occupancy in a room rack, Bedel reads it, matches each row by name against someone already registered and returns it up to date. It registers nobody on its own.
• First-day questions (wifi, opening hours, house rules, where to pick up a parcel) are answered from what the residence has written down, in the language of each person's last message and without touching times or links. What is not written down reaches a person.

When maintenance belongs to an outside company, the difficult conversation is always the same one: how long they take and what keeps coming back. Bedel keeps every maintenance ticket with the time it came in, who took it, when it was closed and with which photo, and the same for what is asked of cleaning. With that, the meeting with the contractor runs on data and not on memory.

• A reminder to whoever owns the ticket at 50 % and 85 % of its category's deadline; an urgent ticket past its deadline sounds again once a day and after three days goes up to management.
• If the same room repeats the same fault within twelve months, the technician receives it flagged as repeated.
• Cleaning receives "do not clean", "come later" and "urgent" with the room number and two buttons: their summary for the day and their tasks.
• The tickets spreadsheet comes out with the columns of your own log, and the dashboard shows over 7, 30 and 90 days how long it takes to pick up and to resolve each notice.

Spanish Act 3/2022 on university coexistence does not name residences. It binds public universities and their public affiliated centres (art. 2.1), and lets private universities and private affiliated centres approve their own rules on its principles (art. 2.2). An affiliated residence is reached by its university's Coexistence Rules through the affiliation; a university-owned one, because its internal rules are drawn up under the university's statutes (Spanish University Student Statute, art. 66.5). A private residence with no university link is not reached by the Act.

• Disciplinary authority over students lies with the rector's office (art. 8). The residence does not impose the sanctions in the Act, and Bedel decides none.
• What the Act asks of the university is a channel for complaints about violence, discrimination or harassment (art. 4.2). Bedel provides the house's own: a confidential channel with the account encrypted, and management gets the notice that there is something to read, without the content.
• If the residence belongs to a public university, the fifty-employee threshold does not apply: Spanish Act 2/2023 requires public universities to have their own internal reporting system (art. 13.1.d). That system belongs to the university, and the residence's channel does not replace it.
• What each law asks of whom, in the coexistence rules guide and in the colegio mayor or university residence guide.

Whoever decides what residents' data is processed for is the data controller: the university, if the residence is its own; the owning entity, if it is affiliated. Bedel processes the data on that controller's behalf and under a contract that says so.

• The data processing agreement and the record of processing activities are published, so the university's legal department can read them before the first meeting.
• The database and the functions live in the European Union, in Ireland; the AI model runs in the United States under the Standard Contractual Clauses.
• In the regions with their own data protection authority, that authority supervises its public sector and those who provide services to it (Spanish Data Protection Act, art. 57): the residence of a public university may answer to it rather than to the national authority (AEPD).
• If the university classifies the places as university housing and assigns them to its students, the Spanish Urban Leases Act does not apply (art. 5.d) and the rules of use are set by the university. Those are the rules Bedel answers from.

• It does not run the call for places or allocate them. In a university-owned residence access goes through a public, objective and transparent procedure (Spanish University Student Statute, art. 66.3), and that procedure is yours: Bedel attends to whoever asks and puts them on the list.
• It has no combined view: one account is one residence. A university with three residences has three accounts, and no screen adds them up.
• It is not the university's management system: it does not charge, does not allocate rooms and does not control access, cards or locks.
• It does not decide sanctions or exceptions to the rules, and it does not replace the Coexistence Committee or the university's internal reporting system.
• It does not translate announcements or what the team writes in the direct chat.
• It is not certified under Spain's National Security Framework (ENS). If your university's procurement file requires it, it is worth saying so on the first call.

• Faults and incidents
• Dining hall
• Allergens
• Parcels
• Space booking
• Announcements
• Arrivals and room rack
• Absence log
• Preventive maintenance
• Reporting channel
• Languages
• Escalation to people
• Dashboard and metrics
• Events and activities
• Admissions