7 min read
A night audit checklist that actually closes the day
The night audit exists to draw a line under a trading day so the next one starts clean. Done properly it takes minutes and catches errors while the person who made them is still on shift. Done as a formality it quietly moves problems into month end.
Close the day, not the clock
A hotel day is a business date, not midnight. A guest checking in at 01:00 belongs to the previous business date, and a late bar posting belongs to the day it was consumed. Every figure downstream, occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, depends on that line being drawn consistently.
The order that catches errors
Run the checks in an order where each one can still be fixed by the shift that caused it.
- Confirm every expected arrival has arrived or been marked a no-show
- Confirm every departure has checked out and settled
- Post room and tax to in-house accounts
- Reconcile outlet postings, bar and restaurant, to the folios
- Check for rooms sold but not occupied, and occupied but not sold
- Verify housekeeping status against the arrivals for tomorrow
- Run the audit and read the day's occupancy, ADR and RevPAR
The checks people skip
Out-of-order rooms are the usual casualty: if a room was taken off inventory but never put back, availability quietly shrinks and RevPAR quietly improves. Second is unposted extras, where a guest checked out before a late charge landed. Both are cheap to catch nightly and expensive to unpick a month later.
What good looks like
A clean audit means the numbers reconcile without anyone reaching for a spreadsheet, the next morning's arrivals list is accurate, and any discrepancy is attributable to a shift and a person. If your audit produces figures nobody trusts, the problem is upstream in posting discipline, not in the report.