One of the most effective strategies for examining the daily, weekly, and monthly health of your hotel is by pulling some simple reports from your system. Running the correct audit reports with the right metrics and information can tell you everything you need to know about any sector of your property.
Pulling things like daily revenue reports for your hotel, hotel shift reports, and hotel housekeeping reports should all be a part of this process at some point or another. These reports are also incredibly simple to pull up and print.
If you can open an excel file and hit the print button, you should be good to go.
However, before you begin printing these hotel reports, you should understand what the most important selections are and the best times to print them. Knowing when to run these audits ensures that you get the most insightful data at the precise times.
This article touches on all these points and highlights the hotel reports you should be running and why they’re so important.
Let’s start with the first step: understanding when to run your hotel reports.
When Should I Consider Running My First Hotel Reports?
You should push your audit reports through at the right time, so you get the most appropriate data. Most reports aren’t going to show any pending transactions. They belong to the past or current set of transactions. Once guests are placed under checked-in status, the status will likely change to show a “posted” tag instead.
When systems have automatic reporting, the transactions for that specific day are placed under the report section one minute before midnight. However, it’s important to note that they may not be available for viewing until 2:00 am. This is because it takes some time for the system to gather all the data necessary to populate a full report.
What Are the Best Hotel Management Reports to Run?
Once everything is settled from the day before, and all information is populated, you’ll finally be able to print the report of your choice. Let’s look at some of the best options for potential reports to run.
Transactions
A transaction report is like a register posting at a store. It makes a note of all postings and payments made from reservations and house accounts. Any voids or changes will be included. You can use different filters to view the information of your choice.
Possible filters you can use to sort include services, credit, items, and debit transactions. The more filters you apply, the more accurate the results will be. You’ll also be able to home in on specific metrics that allow you to fine-tune your system. If the property you run is a substantially larger operation, there may be multiple posts in one day. It’s much easier to filter everything if it’s done one or two transactions at a time.
All the postings that users made throughout the day (front desk workers) can be cross-referenced with the information the night manager comes up with.
The information contained within these reports can be applied so you can view income information as well as services and items reports.
Adjustments Reports
There isn’t a huge difference between adjustment reports and transaction reports. If you print the former, you’ll only receive a printed record of transactions that were adjusted. This includes refunds, rebates, and any other necessary changes.
Again, the night manager can use all the adjustments that were made to cross-reference transactions that were removed from the payment processing system.
Daily Financial Report
This type of report is very much like a manager’s report. Included in the daily financial report, you’ll find statistics for any date that’s been selected. The report places heavy emphasis on the revenue that’s been generated by booked rooms on the date of the report, reservations, and a forecast for the next two weeks. It includes all the necessary data for use on ADR, REVPAR, and occupancy.
When you take advantage of the daily financial report, you’ll be able to accomplish several tasks:
- You’ll have the ability to track production
- Locate staff errors that have been made
- Determine the loss of revenue because of discounts given
- Prepare for the next 14 days
Having the ability to make use of the 14-day production forecast is one of the most critical parts of this report.
Payment Ledger Report
The payment ledger report is a lot like the deposit receivables report. With this report, you’re able to have a look back to check anything that may not be settled, including unpaid reservations. You can view what HAS been paid for and cross-reference to make sure these figures match up to your actual revenue. These figures may also be filtered in multiple ways, such as payment type and date.
These reports can show whether your business has received all payments it was supposed to receive specifically within a specified window.
Tax Report
The tax report for your hotel sums up any taxes and additional fees that were posted for any cleared transactions. It may not seem like a huge deal but checking out reservations is important to ensure that tax information is listed correctly. Taxes and fees should only be checked for complete reservations. Anything labelled as cancelled or no show should never be present on this report.
This report is important because it gives you a quick glimpse into what may be owed for quarterly taxes on a federal or state-to-state basis.
Understanding the various types of reports can be confusing. However, once you get into the habit of printing them for night audits, you’ll find the information isn’t that difficult to digest.
One of the easiest ways to look at these reports is to picture all revenue and income reports as one big report. Breaking down the different reports is essentially just filtering out certain items to contrast against the actual revenue taken in.
If you need help with a quality system to help you track all of these metrics so you can print the appropriate reports, Hotelogix Property Management System helps you measure and manage anything that happens at the front desk. This includes all monetary activity, including credit cards, taxes, as well as all booking dates and room prices.
This is one of many solutions we provide to hotel owners. Find out about our other tools and how we can help optimize your hotel business by contacting us today!