Hotel night audit: the owner's guide

Everything on this site about the night audit, in one place: what it is, what it prints, where it leaks, and what to do with it if you are not at the desk.

What a night audit is

Every hotel closes its books once a night, usually between 2 and 4 am. The night clerk runs the audit in the property management system: room and tax are posted to every in-house folio, the day's payments are balanced against the ledgers, no-shows are processed, and the business date rolls over. The PMS then prints a bundle of reports — the "pack" — and, at most franchised hotels, emails it to whoever is on the distribution list.

That pack is the only complete record of what happened at the desk that day. It is also, at most small hotels, read by nobody. What is in a night audit report walks through it page by page.

Why it matters to an owner who isn't there

The audit balances the books; it does not judge them. A write-off after checkout balances. A guaranteed no-show cancelled instead of charged balances. A rate cut from $154 to $90 balances. The PMS is doing its job perfectly — posting what the clerk told it to post. The question of whether those decisions were right is a different job, and at a 70-room hotel there is no one whose job it is.

Where money leaves through the desk

Six patterns account for most of what we find. Each has its own page with what it looks like on the pack and what to ask.

• No-shows cancelled instead of charged — the largest and most common.
• Write-offs and adjustments after checkout — the one that clusters on a single login.
• Rate overrides below plan — quiet, daily, and easy to explain away.
• Refunds to a different card than was charged — rare, and never innocent.
• A cash drawer that is never over or short — the count written to match.
• Rooms slept in with no folio — housekeeping and the in-house list disagree.

The longer list is in Nine front-desk leaks that hide in plain sight.

What your PMS prints

Every system prints the same facts under different names and in a different order. Guides for the three we read today:

What to read every morning, in five minutes

If you read nothing else: the printed-by time on page one (a pack printed at 6:46 am puts early departures on the wrong day), the cancellation report (any cancel time after the arrival date on a guaranteed booking), the adjustments report (any negative posting on a folio that has already checked out), the rate variance report (anything below the rate code), and the shift closure (a drawer at exactly $0.00 again). The weekly checklist turns that into ten questions to ask your GM every Monday.

Who should be reading it

Not the clerk who ran it — that is the person the report is about. Not the GM alone, if the GM also sets the rates and approves the write-offs. Someone outside the shift: the owner, a management company, an accountant with time, or a service that reads it every night and only sends you the parts that need a decision. That last one is what DeskWatch does. It reads the email your PMS already sends, applies the house rules you give it once, and sends one WhatsApp per hotel before sunrise — or one line saying nothing happened.