Front office management I

Reconciliation of Room Status Discrepancies

 Room status discrepancies should be resolved in time during night audit process since imbalances can also lead to lost business and thus cause confusion in the front office.

 Errors in room status can lead to lost and uncollectible room revenue and omissions in posting.
 The front office should maintain accurate room status information to effectively determine the number and types of room available for sale.
 At the end of the day, the room status report is compared with the housekeepers report and the bucket where the registration cards for in-house guests are kept.
 In automated hotels, the check out process is normally linked to a room management function that automatically monitors and updates the room status.
 Though the room status discrepancies are rare in automated hotels, the night audit process is still necessary to ensure accuracy.

3. Balancing all Departmental Accounts

 It is generally considered more easy for the front office staffs to balance all the departments first and then look for posting errors with-in an out balance department in order to avoid discovering errors in the night audit process.
 The night auditor typically balances all the revenue center departments using the source documents that originated in the revenue centre.
 The night auditor balances all front office transactions against the departmental transaction information.
 The process used to balance the revenue centre departments is often called the trial balance.
 The trial balance usually uncovers any corrections or adjustments that need to be made during the night audit process.
 The trial balance is performed before posting the room rates and thus if the trial balance is correct but the final balance is wrong, then the auditor can find that the error has been made in the posting of the room rates and taxes.
 Thus performing the trial balance before the room rates posting avoids the creation of confusion during the night audit process due to the errors.

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