End of day in a hotel with five open drawers: who closes what and in what order

At eleven thirty at night, the hotel night auditor has one question: has everyone closed? The pool bar closed at six, the coffee shop at eight, the restaurant at eleven, room service is still taking orders and the lobby bar has no intention of closing before one. Without an agreed sequence, the night audit runs with whatever is there, and whatever is missing shows up tomorrow as a lost charge or a guest arguing at check-out.

Five drawers, one business day

The hotel does not close at midnight out of habit; it closes because the night audit rolls the business date. Everything posted before the roll belongs to today; everything posted after belongs to tomorrow. For the front desk that is natural: room nights are charged once a day. For the revenue centers it is a problem, because each one has its own hours and none of them match the auditor’s clock.

Hence the central rule of this article: every revenue center closes its own shift when its service ends, but all of them close their business day before the night audit runs. The bar that is still open at one does not close the day at one: it closes a partial cut before the audit and opens a new shift with tomorrow’s date. Whatever it sells after midnight is tomorrow’s sale, exactly as at the front desk.

That detail settles half the arguments between the restaurant and the controller. The hotel’s sales for the day are the sum of the closes of every revenue center completed before the audit, no more and no less. And that night’s revenue per occupied room is calculated on that same sum, as explained in the article on the metric (How food and beverage revenue per occupied room is calculated, and what a good number looks like).

Order matters: who closes first and why

The sequence is not dictated by how important a revenue center is but by its closing hour and how much it depends on the front desk. The centers that rely most on room charges close earlier, because their charges must be in the PMS before the audit. An order that works in most hotels with five revenue centers:

1. Pool bar: closes with daylight. Almost all of its sales are room charges, so its charges must reach the PMS immediately. It hands over its close and its envelope before dinner starts.
2. Coffee shop: closes at the end of the afternoon. Plenty of cash and card, little folio. It hands over the envelope and the terminal batch, and frees its cashier to help with dinner.
3. Restaurant: closes when the last dinner guest leaves. It is the largest close and the one that sends the most folio charges. Its close is the one the audit waits for most closely.
4. Room service: closes a partial cut before the audit, even if it keeps taking orders. Every later order is born on the next day.
5. Lobby bar: closes a partial cut before the audit and keeps operating on tomorrow’s date. Its real close, with a full count, happens when the shutter comes down.
6. Night audit: runs only when all five closes are in and the day’s folio charges are reconciled with the PMS.

Notice that the last two revenue centers do not close their service in order to close the day. They close the day without closing the service. That is the difference between a shift cut and a date cut, and it is what lets the lobby bar and the night audit coexist without anyone waiting around.

What each revenue center hands over at closing

Closing is not switching off the screen. Every revenue center, whatever the hour, hands over the same package. If one hands over less, the auditor cannot reconcile and the hotel close stalls or goes out with gaps. The full package is this:

• The revenue center close with sales by method: cash, card, folio charge and corporate account, plus the tips section by method, as described in the close guide (/blog/guia-del-corte-de-caja-por-punto-de-consumo).
• The envelope with cash sales, separated from the float, with a slip signed by whoever hands over and whoever receives.
• The card terminal batch close, with the batch number written on the close.
• The list of folio charges sent during the day, check by check, with folio and room, so the auditor can compare it with what the PMS received.
• The day’s comps, voids and discounts, with who authorized them.
• Count differences, if any, with the cashier’s explanation.

When the point of sale produces this package on its own, closing each revenue center takes minutes and the auditor receives five documents with identical structure. When it is assembled by hand, every center does it differently and the auditor spends the first hour of the shift translating.

The night audit: what it checks and what it cannot check without your closes

The night auditor is not a controller; the auditor is the person who verifies the hotel’s day is complete before closing it. As far as food and beverage goes, the audit checks three things: that each revenue center’s sales equal the sum of its methods, that the folio charges sent by the centers equal the charges received in the PMS, and that no charge landed on a closed folio or a room with no guest.

What the auditor cannot do is invent a close that was never handed over. If the restaurant did not close, the auditor has two bad options: wait, and delay the close of the whole hotel, or run the audit without that center and let its charges fall onto tomorrow’s date. The second option is what produces the guest who leaves at seven in the morning with a dinner that “does not show up” and shows up the next day, once the guest is gone.

Nor can the auditor fix differences. They are recorded, passed to the controller and the audit moves on. That is why every close must arrive with its differences explained: the auditor is not going to call the cashier at midnight to ask what happened to 50.

The report the front desk expects at midnight

More than five closes, the front desk expects a single consolidated food and beverage document, with one line per revenue center and a total for the day. It is the one the auditor attaches to the hotel close and the one the general manager reads in the morning. Its structure is the same every night:

The important part of the table is the third column. A consolidated report without a verification source is an opinion. With one, it is a close. And that is the report the front desk (Front desk) needs at midnight, not five terminal tapes stapled together.

An illustrative example with numbers

The figures below are invented to show how the day is consolidated. They are not data from any hotel. On an ordinary night, the five revenue centers closed as follows, in net sales before tax and tips:

The auditor pulls the PMS report of charges received and finds 16,700, not 17,000. The 300 difference is a restaurant charge sent to a room whose guest checked out at five in the afternoon: the PMS rejected it and nobody in the restaurant saw the rejection. The auditor records it as a pending charge, the controller chases it in the morning and the day’s sales remain 36,000 because the sale happened; what is missing is the collection.

Had room service not closed its partial cut, its 3,000 in charges would have fallen onto tomorrow’s date. Three guests with early departures would have paid without that dinner and the hotel would hold 3,000 of consumption it can no longer collect. That is the real cost of not having a sequence.

When a revenue center closes late or does not close

It will happen. A banquet runs long, a cashier gets sick, the terminal will not close the batch. The sequence exists precisely for that: it defines what the auditor does when a center does not arrive. Three rules that keep a delay from becoming a hole:

• Folio charges always travel to the PMS at the moment of the sale, not at closing. Even if the close is late, the day’s charges are already on the right folio before the audit.
• If a center cannot close before the audit, it closes a partial cut with whatever it has and opens a new shift. The auditor runs with the partial and the full close happens on the next date, with a note.
• A center that closed neither fully nor partially is reported as open in the consolidated report, with the name of the person responsible. The line is not invented and it is not left blank.

What to do this week

1. Write the closing sequence with the cut-off time for each revenue center and post it at every drawer and at the night audit desk.
2. Define the single closing package: close, envelope, batch, folio charge list, comps and differences. No center hands over less.
3. Agree with the lobby bar and room service on the partial cut before the audit and the new shift on tomorrow’s date.
4. Ask the auditor for last night’s PMS report of charges received and compare it with the list of charges sent by each center.
5. Review the charges rejected by the PMS over the last seven days: every one is consumption somebody has to collect today.

Inn Restaurant produces the same closing package for every revenue center, allows the partial cut with date change for the lobby bar and room service (Room service), and sends every folio charge at the moment of the sale so the night audit finds it already reconciled. If you would like to see the sequence with your hotel’s own revenue centers, the fifteen minute demo is booked at (contact).