Room Billing Audit — why today's room revenue looks wrong

This report lists every room night in a period twice over: the night the guest actually slept, and the day that night's money was reported. On a healthy period those are the same date. When they are not, this is the report that shows you which nights moved, by how many days, and how much money is involved.

Use it when a day's room revenue does not match what you saw at the front desk — the classic case being "only two guests were in house yesterday, so why does yesterday show a huge figure?"

Before you start

• You need the Reservation Reports permission. If the report is not in your Reports list, ask your manager to add that permission to your role.
• Pick your period from the date presets (Today, Yesterday, This month, and so on) or set the two dates yourself.

How to read it

The report is dated by the night stayed, not by the posting date. So if you choose 1–31 August you get every night slept in August, including any whose money was reported in September.

The tile Nights posted off-date is the headline. If it reads 0, room revenue is landing on the right days and there is nothing to investigate.

Steps

1. Open Reports → Room Billing Audit.
2. Choose the period. Start with This month.
3. Look at the Nights posted off-date tile.
   • 0 — nothing is mis-dated. Any surprise in the revenue figure is coming from somewhere else; try the Checked Out or Collections report.
   • More than 0 — carry on to step 4.
4. The worst-drifting nights are sorted to the top of the grid. Read the Night stayed, Posted on and Adrift columns together.
5. Scroll to Room revenue per day, two ways at the bottom. This is the manager's view: for each date it shows what the sales reports say (As posted) beside what was actually slept (By night stayed). The Difference column points straight at the days being questioned.
6. Click any row to open that guest's folio on Review Billings, where you can see the night in context.

Tips

• Export to Excel to keep a copy before a correction is applied — the columns export as numbers, so you can total them.
• A run of nights all posting on the same later date almost always means a catch-up billing run: the rooms were billed in one go, and every night the run touched was stamped with the day the run happened.
• This report and the Sales reports are supposed to disagree on a mis-dated night. That disagreement is the finding, not a fault in either report.

Common problems

• "Adrift shows +1 on almost every night." The nights were dated by the billing time rather than by the stay. New nights bill onto the correct date; older ones stay where they were posted until an administrator re-dates them. Show your administrator this report — the drift figure is what they need.

• "Some rows have no night and no room." Those are anchors and room-change markers. They carry an amount but do not represent a night slept, so they are counted in the money totals and left out of the per-day comparison. The count is shown under the grid. They are listed rather than hidden so that a total which looks too high can always be explained.

• "The total here does not equal the Revenue by Department figure." Expected whenever nights are adrift, because this report is bounded by the night and that one by the posting date. Compare the As posted column instead — that is the figure the other reports use.

• "A night shows less than the room rate." Check % billed. A part-billed night is normal for late check-out, early departure or a room change part-way through the day.

• "Nothing appears at all." Either no rooms were occupied in the period, or your period is set to future dates. Try This month.