Adopt a cloud-based PMS and simplify the night audit process at your hotel

Prabhash Bhatnagar -

Night audit in the hotel industry is a mandatory process. Also referred to as front office audit, it consolidates all the transactions after the end of a particular business day, segregates them, and posts them under respective folios. In simple words, it summarizes a hotel’s financial transactions captured during a day, and advances the date to the next business day.

The hotel industry is a 24X7 guest facing enterprise. Night audit is always done during late evening or early morning. This is because, the volume of transactions, check-ins/outs are comparatively lesser towards the closing hours. It is a process defined in the Hotel PMS that runs at the end of the day to audit that particular day’s revenue and payments. Understanding the night audit process & why you need a cloud PMS for this

By providing insights into the hotel’s daily transactions, finances, and reservations etc, night audit reports enable the hotel management to keep costs under control to enhance profit margin. That’s why accuracy matters a lot when we talk about the importance of night audit. And to ensure higher level correctness in this, one must adopt a cloud hotel property management system. A smart smart cloud PMS takes care of this mandatory process by –

  1. 1. Posting room/tax charges
  2. 2. Accumulating guest charges and payments
  3. 3. Reconciling department-wise financial activities
  4. 4. Settling the accounts – both receivable and payable
  5. 5. Running the trial balance (summarized financial status of your hotel for a specific date)
  6. 6. Generating guest folios during the date rollover

Once the date rollover takes place, the current day’s account is locked. The night audit process always ends with night audit reports. These daily reports are vital to the management. The manager can now understand daily revenue, occupancy and other important details by looking at several reports including –

  1. 1. Accommodation report
  2. 2. Revenue report – room/non-room
  3. 3. Tax report
  4. 4. Cashier’s report
  5. 5. Counter report
  6. 6. Credit report
  7. 7. Arrival/departure/no show report etc

A cloud PMS makes night audits easy and automated! How? Let’s check!

  1. 1. Guest folios are automatically generated (Includes addition of charges for extra services used)
  2. 2. All charges for the next day are automatically posted in addition to all allowances for package inclusions
  3. 3. It’s easy to list out reservation disparity and assign for user action
  4. 4. Night audit rectifies addition of extra charges that may happen due to manual errors
  5. 5. Closes cash counters
  6. 6. The active date of working changes over to the next day as the current day’s account gets locked
  7. 7. You get instant access to summaries of transactions and other night audit reports critical for your business

With a cloud-based Hotel PMS in place, the night audit process becomes simplified and streamlined. Thus, you can ensure the integrity of the whole process to have accurate report at your disposal.

Through automation, a cloud-based online hotel management software reduces massive amounts of work for night auditors. Smart hoteliers have witnessed improved efficiency with the help of relevant reports provided by a correct night audit process. Are you ready to do so?

This article is originally published in HotelNewsResource.