Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 1 Night Audit and Report Management

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 2 Overview of Night Audit Functions Audit: The process of verifying records for correctness and completeness.

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 3 Overview of Night Audit Functions Accounting review functions: –A review of guest charges Each guest account must be: Current Complete Correct Confirmable –A review of non-guest charges and property accounting

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 4 Overview of Night Audit Functions Reporting and data management functions: –Night audit data reports –Data management

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 5 Accounting for Guest Charges Folio accounting: –Military time Bucket check No-show billings End-of-day balances: –Manager’s Daily: A summary of a hotel’s daily revenue generation that can include additional operating data as requested by the manager.

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 6 Other Night Audit Accounting Procedures Ledger management: Guest Ledger City Ledger Credit balance management: –Credit Balance: An amount owed to guests by the hotel. –Credit Limit Report: A comparison of a guest’s folio balances to the amount of credit established for that guest. –Credit Manager: The person responsible for establishing and enforcing the hotel’s credit policies.

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 7 Other Night Audit Accounting Procedures End-of-day reconciliations: –Trial Balance: A first effort to determine whether a set of debits was posted with a corresponding and equal set of credit postings.

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 8 Other Night Audit Accounting Procedures End-of-day reconciliations: –X Report: The term commonly used to indicate the total revenue generated by a revenue-producing department during one part of a specific time period. –Z Report: The term commonly used to indicate the total revenues generated during an entire time period. Producing a Z report includes re-setting the continuous total feature of a POS or other electronic register system to “zero” to begin recording the next period’s revenues.

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 9 Other Night Audit Accounting Procedures Other night audit tasks: –The automatic transfer of advance deposits to the guest ledger from the advanced deposits portion of the general ledger when applicable guests check-in –A summary, by individual account, of all debit and credit postings to those accounts since the last audit –The creation of selected financial reports for use in the back office accounting system

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 10 Night Audit Data Reporting Purpose of night audit reports Sources of data Types of reports: –Emergency reports –Revenue-generation reports –Reservation-activity reports –Exception reports –Management-oriented reports Credit-relatedGroup sales-related Housekeeping-relatedMaintenance-related Accounts receivable-related Report distribution

Woods et al., Professional Front Office Management © 2007 Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ All Rights Reserved. 11 Managing Night Auditor Data Types of data –Historical data –Managerial data Data re-setting Data archiving