Night Audit

A hotel serves guests around the clock, but its accounting still needs a daily cutoff, and the night audit makes the day's transactions ready for review and the next business date. The process can include checking departures, open folios and cashier balances, though system steps vary by property and a team should follow its configured checklist rather than assume every hotel closes alike.

In a fictional hotel, one guest is marked due out but still in a room, so the auditor checks whether the stay was extended, and the unresolved status must be corrected before the close. Guest folios record room charges, taxes, services and payments, and an audit checks that postings match the reservations and reports; a difference needs investigation, not a plug figure.

In a fictional case a guest pays for dinner at the hotel restaurant and the charge appears twice on the folio, so the auditor flags the duplicate for correction. Room and tax postings may be part of an automated end-of-day sequence whose configuration determines what posts and when, and audit exceptions still need a responsible person, as when a fictional system set to apply a nightly room charge misses a package line through a setup error and the auditor investigates the missing amount before final reporting.

Cash and card transactions should be reconciled to the relevant records, and a card authorisation is not necessarily a settled payment, so use the correct processing and settlement reports. A fictional front desk records $2,000 in card payments but the processor batch differs, so the team compares transactions one by one and documents the exception.

A business date can roll at night even though the calendar date changed hours earlier, which groups operational reports without changing a guest's stay dates. A fictional property rolls its business date at three in the morning, so an earlier service charge may belong to the prior business day and staff verify the rule.

Open folios and unsettled accounts need handling, and a system may pause closing until required statuses are resolved, so an auditor should understand the reason rather than force an arbitrary entry. A fictional checked-out guest retains an approved open account, and the team follows the property's settlement rules rather than writing off the balance to finish the audit.

The audit produces daily operating and financial reports that managers use to understand rooms sold, revenue and exceptions, with report fields depending on the property system. A fictional manager compares the daily room revenue report with cashier totals, and a mismatch points to a coding issue, so they keep the correction trail.

No-show handling can affect charges and occupancy records, so the auditor checks the property policy and booking terms, because a no-show is not automatically a full-rate sale; staff at a fictional property check a guaranteed booking's terms before posting any no-show fee and record the outcome correctly. Night audits can be partly automated, which reduces routine posting work, but a human still reviews unusual cases because the goal is a reliable close, not a button pressed.

Timing matters for downstream teams, since late reports leave revenue management and accounting with incomplete numbers, so set a handover and escalation path, as when a fictional revenue manager needs yesterday's occupancy by morning and the night team records an exception and sends the final report after correction. The night auditor may also answer guest requests at a small hotel, so a busy shift needs protected time for reconciliation, and a reconciliation is more than totals adding up, because source transactions must be valid and coded correctly, and a payment posted to the wrong guest can balance the cash total yet misstate room revenue until folio review finds it.