Night auditor’s guide: what to review in the restaurant before closing the hotel day

At eleven at night the restaurant has closed, the bar is about to, and the person running the hotel’s night audit has a long list of things to review before rolling the business date. The restaurant is usually the part done fastest and worst: take the close the cashier left, add it up, move on. This guide proposes another way: twenty minutes, four blocks and one rule: nothing from the restaurant is closed without crossing it against the folios.

Why the restaurant belongs in the night audit

A hotel’s end of day moves the business date: everything that happened today is sealed, and from tomorrow it can no longer be corrected without leaving a trace. If the restaurant closes badly, the mistakes are sealed with it. A room charge that never reached the folio becomes a sale nobody will collect. A comp without a reason becomes an expense without an owner. An open check becomes a sale on the wrong day.

The restaurant is also the source of most of the disputes the front desk handles the next morning. The guest who checks out at seven sees the folio before anyone from the restaurant has arrived. If the night auditor did not review the charges, the front desk settles the dispute with no information and almost always in the guest’s favor, at the restaurant’s expense.

Finally, the daily report the owner and the controller see comes out of this close. If today’s food and beverage revenue per occupied room is wrong because one revenue center never closed, the whole month’s metric carries that error. Twenty minutes well spent at night save the controller hours in the morning.

Before you start: what to have at hand

The restaurant audit is fast only if everything is in one place. Before starting the clock, make sure you have these items in view, ideally on a single screen rather than four printed sheets.

• The close of every revenue center for the day: restaurant, bar, pool, room service and any other outlet that sold.
• The day’s room charge report, with folio, room, time, revenue center and who posted it.
• The list of charges received on the front desk folios for the same day, with the same information.
• The day’s comps, discounts and voids report, with reason and authorizer.
• The list of open checks at the time of the review, with the server’s name and the revenue center.
• Tomorrow’s departures report, to know which guests will see their folio in the next few hours.

If any of those items does not exist or cannot be pulled from the system, the guide still holds, but the time multiplies. The reports page (Reports) shows what these six items look like when they come from the same source.

Minutes 1 to 5: the close of each revenue center

The first block answers a single question: did every revenue center close its shift, and does the close balance? It is reviewed outlet by outlet, not in total, because an overage at the bar can be hiding a shortage at the pool.

For each outlet three things are checked: that the close exists and is signed by whoever handed in the cash; that the declared cash matches what the system expected, or that the difference is explained in writing; and that card sales match the outlet’s bank terminal settlement. An outlet that did not close is not closed by the auditor: the restaurant manager is called and a note is left.

The golden rule of this block is never to close anyone’s shift. The night auditor reviews; they do not declare cash they did not count. If the bar is still open at that hour, its close is reviewed with the next day’s end of day and noted as pending. The shift close guide by revenue center (A guide to the shift close by revenue center in a hotel) details what each close should look like so this block takes five minutes and not twenty.

Minutes 6 to 12: room charges against the folios

This is the most important block and the one almost never done. The point of sale says how many room charges were posted today and for how much. The front desk folios say how many charges they received today and for how much. The two numbers must be equal, in count and in amount. When they are not, there is consumption the guest will not pay for or a charge they will dispute.

The cross-check takes six minutes if the charges were born with a verified folio, because the point of sale and the front desk are looking at the same stay. It takes an hour if the room number was typed into a text field and every charge has to be hunted by hand. The room charge page (Room charge) explains that difference from the moment the guest says “To my room, please.”

Minutes 13 to 17: comps, voids and discounts

The third block is not looking for culprits: it is looking for gaps. Open the day’s report of everything that reduced a check and read three columns: reason, authorizer and amount. What you are looking for are empty reasons, servers authorizing their own checks and amounts out of the ordinary for the revenue center.

A welcome comp of one coffee makes sense in the restaurant. A comp of a full bottle at the bar at eleven at night with no authorizer makes no sense and must be noted so the manager sees it first thing. The auditor does not reverse it: they flag it. Reversing belongs to the manager, with the person present.

Voids made after the item left the kitchen deserve special attention. If the trail says the dish was sent at 20:10 and voided at 21:30 with no reason, that dish was served and eaten. It is the classic place where consumption leaks in a hotel restaurant, along with the others described in the article on the eight places where a hotel loses consumption (The eight places where a hotel loses food and beverage revenue).

Minutes 18 to 20: open checks and the end of day

Before sealing the date, look at the list of open checks. Each one is a sale from today that will show up tomorrow if it is not closed, and that distorts both days. Checks at the bar that is still open are legitimate and are left alone. Checks in the restaurant, which closed two hours ago, should not exist: each has a server’s name and a story, and both get written down.

With the four blocks done, the auditor runs the hotel’s end of day. They leave a short report for the restaurant manager and the controller: outlets that did not close, cash differences with their explanation, charges that did not cross, flagged comps and voids, and checks open at close. That report is the first thing the front desk and the restaurant read in the morning, and it is what keeps the seven o’clock dispute from being settled blind.

An illustrative example of a night with two findings

The figures below are invented to show the arithmetic. The hotel had four revenue centers open today. This is what the auditor’s night looks like.

Block one: all four closes balance, 4,700 expected and 4,700 declared. Block two: the point of sale reports 31 room charges for 12,600; the front desk folios received 30 charges for 12,100. One charge of 500 is missing. It is located by time: a pool charge at 16:40 to room 412, whose guest checked out at 15:00. The charge was posted to a stay that no longer existed. First finding: 500 that becomes a receivable with the server’s name and the detail, for the manager to decide in the morning.

Block three: five comps for 1,150 in total. Four have a reason and an authorizer. One, for 350 at the bar, has neither. Second finding: noted for the manager, not reversed. Block four: two open checks, both at the bar, which is still serving. Left alone. The auditor closes the day with a six-line report and it took twenty minutes. Without the review, the 500 would have been lost and the 350 would have been added to a comps total nobody looks at.

What to do this week

1. Ask whoever runs the night audit how much time they spend on the restaurant today and what they review. If the answer is “I add up the close”, start with block two.
2. Run the room charge cross-check for a single night: count and amount sent against received. Write down how long it took.
3. Print this four-block list, put it on the auditor’s desk and ask them to use it three nights in a row.
4. Agree with the restaurant manager that checks open at end of day are explained in writing, not closed quietly.
5. Make sure the six-line night report reaches the front desk before the first departure of the day.

Inn Restaurant delivers the close by revenue center, the charges by folio report and the comps with reason report on the same screen, so this twenty-minute block actually takes twenty minutes. If you want to see how the cross-check with the front desk works, the 15-minute demo is booked on the contact page (contact).