Why every revenue center in the hotel needs its own drawer and its own close

It is three in the afternoon at your hotel. The restaurant is serving lunch, the bar has a full terrace and the pool is selling beers from the loungers. Three revenue centers, three servers collecting, and a single drawer at the restaurant counter where everyone arrives with bills in hand. At eleven at night the close balances. And nobody can say how much the pool sold.

What a revenue center is and why the hotel has several

A revenue center is any place in the hotel where a guest or a visitor consumes something and a food and beverage sale is generated: the restaurant, the bar, the pool bar, the lobby coffee shop, room service, the minibar. A street restaurant has one center. A hotel restaurant is almost never alone: it lives next to two, three or five more centers that open at different hours, with different teams and different customers.

The hospitality accounting standard, USALI, asks each center to report its revenue, its food and beverage cost and its payroll separately. It is not an accountant’s whim. It is the only way to know whether the pool makes or loses money, whether the bar carries the restaurant or the other way around, and whether it pays to keep room service open until midnight or close it at ten. Without data by center, all of those decisions are made by ear.

And the data by center starts in the drawer. If the pool’s cash lands in the restaurant drawer, there is no clean way to separate it at the end of the day. You can estimate, you can remember, you can ask the server. None of those three things is data.

What you lose when centers share a drawer

A drawer shared between centers looks like a simplification. It is actually a surrender: you give up knowing several things in exchange for saving a drawer. This is the list of what you stop knowing.

• How much each center sold in cash, and therefore how much each center sold in total.
• What the food and beverage cost of each center is, because cost is compared against a revenue you do not have separated.
• Who answers for the cash. With three teams handing money into the same drawer, a shortage belongs to everyone and to no one.
• How much each team earned in tips. Bar tips mix with restaurant tips and the split ends in an argument.
• How much cash moved from one center to another during the shift. That transfer is recorded nowhere.
• Whether the pool carries itself in low season or whether it is better to close it and send the guest to the bar.

Notice that none of those six things can be recovered afterwards. A shared drawer cannot be “unconsolidated” at close. What went in mixed stays mixed.

One drawer per center, one close per center

The rule is short: each revenue center opens with its own float, collects in its own drawer, has its own cashiers with their own logins, and closes with its own close per shift. The drawer can be physical, at the bar counter, or it can be a handheld in the pool server’s hand with its own close. What it cannot be is the same drawer as the restaurant.

The close by center answers how much that place sold and with which payment method: cash, card, room charge, company account. Within that close, each cashier has their own. The two layers together are what let the hotel controller go from the night’s consolidated total down to the ticket for a beer at the pool at four in the afternoon. The full mechanics of the close by center are in the corresponding guide (A guide to the shift close by revenue center in a hotel).

In a small hotel this sounds like a lot. In practice it is three five-minute closes, each done by the person who was at that center, instead of one twenty-minute close done by someone who was at none of them.

The consolidated total is calculated, not typed in

Here is the central idea of this article. The hotel total, the number the owner sees in the morning, should not be typed in by anyone. It should be the automatic sum of each center’s closes, done by each cashier, with every ticket behind it. When the total is entered by hand in a spreadsheet, even by the most honest manager, two things break: traceability and trust.

Traceability breaks because a typed number has no tickets behind it. If the owner asks where it came from, the answer is “from last night’s close”, and last night’s close is a sheet with a total on it. Trust breaks because a number someone wrote could have been written wrong, by mistake or on purpose, and there is no way to tell the two cases apart.

When the consolidated total is calculated, the controller’s review changes in nature. They no longer verify the total: they verify that each center close is signed, that the sum of cashiers in each center matches the center close, and that the sum of centers matches the consolidated total. If something does not balance, the problem is in an identifiable center and not in “the register”. The total is never adjusted; the close that was wrong gets corrected, and the total recalculates on its own.

An illustrative example with numbers

The figures below are made up to show the calculation. They are not from any hotel. Imagine a day with three centers open: restaurant, bar and pool bar, each with its close by payment method.

Nobody typed the consolidated total: 12,400 plus 6,300 plus 2,700 is 21,400 in cash; 8,600 plus 4,200 plus 800 is 13,600 in cards; 5,000 plus 3,500 plus 4,500 is 13,000 in room charges; and 21,400 plus 13,600 plus 13,000 is 48,000. Every cell of the consolidated total has three closes behind it and every close has its tickets.

Now look at what the shared drawer was hiding. The pool bar sold 8,000 and 4,500 of that was room charge: more than half of its sales. It is a center that lives off the guest and off the verified charge to the folio, not off cash. With a single drawer for the three centers, that fact does not exist: you would only know the hotel made 48,000 and that 21,400 was bills. You would not know that the pool barely handles cash, or that if the room charge fails at the pool, you lose more than half of what it sells.

The pool and the bar: the centers that suffer most from a shared drawer

The pool bar has no counter and no physical drawer. The server walks between loungers, the guest carries no wallet, and the natural sale is a room charge from a handheld. When that center has no close of its own, the server writes in a notebook, collects in cash whatever they can, and carries the bills to the restaurant at the end of the afternoon. What was written down and not collected disappears. How that particular center is solved is on the pool bar page (Pool bar).

The bar has the opposite problem: it closes later than the restaurant. If they share a drawer, at eleven at night the restaurant has already done its close and the bar keeps collecting into a drawer that is already closed in the system. The bar’s last hour of sales ends up in the next day’s close or in none. With its own drawer, the bar closes when the bar closes.

Room service has a third problem: almost everything is a room charge and the server who takes the order upstairs collects nothing. If room service is not its own center, its sales get lost inside the restaurant and you never know how much the guest orders from the room or at what time.

What the point of sale has to do

One drawer per center only works if the system understands that the hotel has centers. This is the minimum list of what the point of sale in your hotel’s restaurant has to be able to do.

• Treat each revenue center as its own entity, with its menu, its hours, its float and its drawer, physical or on a handheld.
• Give each cashier a login and tie every ticket to the cashier and the center where it was collected.
• Close each center per shift independently, without waiting for the others to close.
• Record any cash transfer between centers with a slip, so the source close and the destination close both balance.
• Calculate the hotel’s consolidated total from the center closes, with no editable field for the total.
• Report revenue, cost and payment methods by center, with the room charge tied to the guest folio, in the format USALI asks for.

When the system does this, the morning report shows three lines and a total nobody typed. What those reports by center look like is on the reports page (Reports).

Objections you will hear

Every time a hotel separates its drawers the same three objections come up. It helps to have the answer ready.

• “We do not have space for three registers.” You do not need three pieces of furniture. You need a physical drawer in the restaurant, one at the bar, and a handheld with its own close for the pool.
• “It is more work to close three times.” It is three short closes done by whoever was there, against one long close done by someone who was at none of them. The total time is similar and the result is not comparable.
• “The manager already knows how much each center sells.” They know it from memory. Memory cannot be compared against last month, cannot be audited and cannot be taken to the meeting with the owner.

What to do this week

1. Make the list of your hotel’s revenue centers that were open yesterday and note which drawer each one collected in.
2. Wherever two centers share a drawer, open a drawer or a handheld for the second one and assign it its own float starting tomorrow.
3. Check who types in today’s total and where. If it is a spreadsheet, keep it as evidence of what you want to stop doing.
4. Ask each center for its own close for seven days and add up the three yourself. Compare against the total that is reported today.
5. Look at what share of pool and room service sales over those seven days was room charge. That number tells you how much you depend on the verified charge.

Inn Restaurant runs each revenue center in the hotel with its drawer, its cashiers and its close, and builds the consolidated total from those closes with no field that gets typed by hand. If you want to see how the restaurant, the bar and the pool at your hotel close on the same night, book a fifteen-minute demo (contact).