How to audit the restaurant’s charges on the folios every morning in twenty minutes

Every night your hotel’s restaurant sends dozens of charges to guest folios, and every morning somebody has to confirm they arrived in full, to the right room and with the right authorization. If that is reviewed at month end, the errors have already been charged wrong, invoiced and the guest is gone. If it is reviewed every morning, they get fixed before check-out and cost minutes, not money.

Why the audit belongs to the morning, not to month end

A restaurant charge has a short window in which it can be fixed at no cost: from the moment it is posted until the guest settles the folio and leaves. After check-out, fixing it means calling the guest, reissuing an invoice, refunding a card or absorbing the loss. That is why auditing restaurant charges is a task for the night auditor or for the front desk first thing, not for the controller at month end.

The second reason is that restaurant errors look alike and repeat. A server who mistypes the room number does it several times a week. Catch it on day two and you talk to him on day two. Catch it on day thirty and you have twenty-eight days of charges to review one by one.

What you need at hand before you start

The routine fits in twenty minutes only if the four reports that feed it are already generated when you sit down. If you have to build them by hand in a spreadsheet, the routine becomes an hour and stops happening.

• The restaurant’s room charge report, by revenue center, with time, server, room and destination folio, for the business day that just closed.
• The list of food and beverage charges the folios received at the front desk, for the same period, by revenue center.
• The list of rooms occupied last night, with credit status and expected departure time.
• The restaurant’s report of comps, discounts and voids, with approver and reason.

If the restaurant’s point of sale and the front desk share the folios, the first two reports are the same information seen from two sides and the match is almost automatic. If they are two systems, you do the match yourself, and this guide is written assuming you have to.

Match one: what the restaurant posted against what the folios received

Start with the totals, by revenue center. Count of charges and sum of amounts the restaurant says it sent, against count and sum the folios say they received. Restaurant, bar, pool, room service and coffee shop, each on its own line. If all the lines agree in count and amount, match one is done in three minutes.

The most common error in this match is not that the sum disagrees. It is that it agrees by accident: one charge that never arrived and another that arrived twice, for the same amount, cancel each other in the total. That is why the match is by revenue center and by count of charges, not only by grand total. A bar with twenty-one charges sent and twenty-two received has a duplicate even if the hotel’s total balances to the cent.

What to look for when it does not balance

A charge the restaurant sent and no folio received almost always belongs to a room that had already checked out when the charge was posted, or to a room number that did not exist. A charge the folio received and the restaurant does not have in its report is a manual posting made from the front desk, and those are the ones to review most carefully, because they never went through the point of sale.

Match two: every charge against a live stay

Match two moves from the total to the charge. Every restaurant charge must correspond to a room that was occupied the night of the charge, with a guest who had open credit for consumption. If the charge was tied to the folio at the moment of posting, with the stay verified on screen, the system did this match and you only review the exceptions. If the server typed the room number into a text field, you do this match yourself, room by room, and it is what eats most of the twenty minutes.

The three questions of match two are simple. Was the room occupied that night? Was the guest authorized to charge to the room, or was the booking an agency reservation covering lodging only? Does the time of the charge fall inside the stay, meaning after arrival and before departure? A negative answer to any of the three is a charge that has to be moved, collected another way or cancelled before the guest sees the folio.

The room charge page (Room charge) explains why a text field is not enough for this match and what verifying the stay from the table means. For the auditor the difference is concrete: from twelve minutes to two.

Match three: comps, discounts and voids against their approvals

The third match reviews everything that reduced a charge or made it disappear. Every comp, discount and void of the day must have an approver with permission and a reason. Here you are not looking for a sum to balance; you are looking for pattern anomalies. The same server with four voids in one shift. A one hundred percent discount with no destination folio. A comp to a room that was not occupied. A reason that says “error” ten times in a row.

This match takes the least time and protects the most money, because the errors of the first two are usually honest and the ones here sometimes are not. Write one line per finding and pass it to the restaurant manager; do not resolve it yourself. Your job is to detect; his is to explain.

The twenty minutes, step by step

1. Minutes 1 to 3: open the four reports and confirm they all cover the same business day, with the same cut-off time. A match across two different calendars is useless.
2. Minutes 4 to 8: match one. Totals by revenue center, count of charges and amount. Flag the lines that do not agree.
3. Minutes 9 to 15: match two. Review the exceptions on the flagged lines and, if charges are not tied to the folio, check room by room that the stay is valid.
4. Minutes 16 to 18: match three. Read comps, discounts and voids looking for patterns, not sums.
5. Minutes 19 and 20: write the result in three lines: what balanced, what did not, and who you are handing it to. Without that summary, the audit did not happen.

If the morning summary says “everything balanced” twenty days in a row, do not relax: check that the reports really cover every revenue center, including the pool and room service, which are the ones that usually fall outside. The guide to the shift close by revenue center (A guide to the shift close by revenue center in a hotel) explains how to make sure each center closes its own day.

An illustrative example with numbers

The figures below are invented to show the calculation and do not belong to any hotel. Picture a hotel with three revenue centers that post to rooms, on an ordinary morning.

If the auditor only looks at the total, the morning ends in one minute with two live errors. In the match by revenue center both appear: in the restaurant, a charge of 500 was sent to a room that had checked out at six in the morning, before the server closed the breakfast check. In the bar, a charge of 500 was posted twice because the server thought the first one had not gone through. The bar guest would have paid a thousand for a five-hundred check, and the restaurant guest would have had breakfast for free.

Both are fixed before nine in the morning: the duplicate is voided with a reason and the orphan charge is collected at the front desk from the guest who is still in the lobby waiting for a ride. Neither cost money. A month later, without the routine, both would have.

What to do with what you find

Every finding falls into one of four categories, and every category has an owner. Classifying it properly keeps the auditor from ending up doing everyone’s job.

• Server keying error (wrong room, duplicate charge): fixed on the spot and noted in the server’s file; three in a month means a conversation with the restaurant manager.
• Orphan charge (the room had checked out or did not exist): try to collect at the front desk if the guest is still in the hotel; if not, hand it to the manager to decide whether to charge the card on file with authorization or record it as a loss with a reason.
• Manual posting from the front desk with no restaurant ticket: ask for the backup the same day; if it does not exist, void it and the front desk manager explains.
• Pattern anomaly in comps or voids: document it and hand it to the controller, who decides whether it is a process error or something else.

What the controller receives each week is the summary of the seven daily summaries, and with it sees trends a single day does not show. That is the report worth the Monday meeting, and the controller page (Controller) describes how it is put together.

What to do this week

1. Define a single cut-off time for the business day for the restaurant and the front desk, and write it where both can see it.
2. Generate the four reports of the routine for yesterday and measure how long it takes to have them at hand; if it is more than five minutes, that is the first problem to solve.
3. Do match one by revenue center three mornings in a row and note which lines fail and why.
4. Check how many restaurant charges reach the folios with the room number typed by hand; that number is the size of your match two.
5. Hand the three-line summary to the restaurant manager every morning and to the controller every Monday, even when it says “everything balanced”.

Inn Restaurant ties every restaurant charge to the guest folio with the stay verified, and hands the auditor the day’s comps, discounts and voids with approver and reason, so that the three matches become mostly exceptions. If you want to see how the morning review is done with the reports page (Reports) in front of you, the fifteen-minute demo (contact) walks through it from start to finish.