Night Audit

The Night Audit is the structured walk-through your hotel runs once per day — usually overnight — to confirm every room is billed, every collection is reconciled, and the books are closed. Opening the page starts tonight's audit for you, and the system tracks your progress: you can walk away and resume where you left off. If today is already closed, the page shows the finished audit instead, with its Audit trail.

Before you start

• You need Night Audit access. Most properties grant it to the Night Auditor role plus General Manager and Front Desk Manager.
• Open the page from Reservations → Night Audit in the sidebar.
• Confirm tonight is the right date. The system defaults to today; if you're running the audit at 02:00, double-check whether you intend to close yesterday or today.

The six steps

The runbook walks you through six steps in order. Each step has a clear pass condition, and the system blocks you from advancing past an unresolved step.

1. Post pending charges — the box at the top says how your hotel bills:
   • Automatic billing is on (Setup → Preferences → Hotel / Reservation → Auto-Bill Guests): every in-house room is charged by itself at its billing time. Nothing to do unless a room is listed under Waiting to be billed; just Mark done.
   • Manual billing (Auto-Bill Guests off, for hotels that prefer to bill by hand): every in-house room whose paid time has ended is listed under Waiting to be billed, with the guest and the time they are paid until. Press Bill N rooms now to charge them, then Mark done. Billing is safe to run more than once: a room already billed is never billed twice.
2. Process no-shows — advance bookings due today or earlier whose guests never checked in. Decide per booking:
   • Cancel — flips booking status to "Booking Cancelled". No charge.
   • Flag — flips status to "No Show". No charge. Use when the guest might still arrive but you want the room re-released to inventory.
   • Charge (fee) — flips to "No Show" and records that the room type's no-show fee should be charged. The fee is set on each room type's No-Show Fee field; with no fee set the button reads Charge (no fee set) and is greyed out. Note: this records the decision only; the fee is not yet posted to an invoice, so bill it yourself (or keep the deposit) until automatic charging arrives. Select decisions row by row, then click Apply N decisions.
3. Reconcile cash & cards — two-column summary: today's collections broken down by payment-method category (Cash / Card / Bank transfer / Other) on the left; per-cashier shift table (Expected / Counted / Variance) on the right. Variance amounts in red are short; green are over. Confirm everything matches the till. If any restaurant or bar tables are still open, an amber box lists them with their unbilled value. Their sales aren't in today's figures until they're billed. This is a warning only: you can still close the day, and the tables carry over. The same box shows again on the close step.
4. Late checkouts — rooms still occupied past their scheduled check-out are listed. Open each folio and run Bill & Check Out, or extend the stay if the guest is staying longer.
5. Review daily report — a snapshot of occupancy, revenue, money collected and the change in what guests owe. If a red Variance check off by … warning shows, open the full Daily Report before closing: money in should equal sales minus what was added to guest balances, and a variance means something was posted somewhere unexpected.
6. Close the business day — when steps 1–5 are done or skipped, mark this step done, then click Complete & close day in the footer. The day is stamped with the close time and your name; its reports stop changing (the day shows "Closed" everywhere). If a Daily Report Email Recipient is configured in Setup → Preferences → Hotel/Reservation, the Daily Report is emailed as HTML to that address. Email failures are logged but never block the close — the report stays available via the audit-trail screen for ops to resend manually.

After closing, an Audit trail → button appears in the footer. Click it to see everything done in the audit and who did it (each step done or skipped, each no-show decision with the guest's name, the close). Print it to file with the night's paperwork.

Mark Done vs Skip

Each step has two final actions:

• Mark done — the operator did the step (or confirmed the system already had).
• Skip — the step doesn't apply tonight (no advance bookings outstanding → skip no-shows; no late checkouts → skip late checkouts).

Both count as "resolved" for the purposes of advancing the runbook, but the audit-trail report records which steps were skipped vs done so managers can spot patterns over time.

Soft-tag day boundary

Closing the day does not block post-close transactions. If a guest walks in at 03:00 after you've closed, the receipt still posts, and it counts towards the next day's figures.

This is intentional — the soft-tag boundary keeps the front desk unblocked while giving accounting a clear "which day did this belong to" answer at report time.

Common problems

• "Can't start session — an in-progress session already exists" — another operator started one. The shell picks up that existing session and shows you where it left off; just continue.
• "Cannot finish — step X must be resolved before close" — walk back to step X on the left rail and either Mark done or Skip it.
• "Day is already open" when reopening — the day wasn't closed in the first place. Refresh the page.
• I need to reopen a closed day — there is no button for this yet. Ask your Business Sensor support contact; reopening puts the audit back In Progress so you can redo steps and close again.
• The Variance check shows a difference — open the full Daily Report. Typical causes: a receipt posted to an account that isn't a guest's, or a guest payment that doesn't match a sale. Fix the entry, then come back to step 5.
• Permission denied — your user is missing the Night Audit permission. Ask an Administrator to enable it on your user group.