Night audit checklist: closing the hotel business day in order

Night audit is the sequence that closes a hotel's business day: reconcile the in-house list and room status, settle no-shows and late arrivals, post room and board charges and check each rate, balance cash, cards, deposits and foreign currency, read the exception reports, then roll the business date. Order matters: some decisions cannot change once the date moves.

It is 02:40. The drawer is short by an amount nobody can explain, one departure still shows a balance, and the business date is about to roll. Whatever you decide in the next twenty minutes cannot be edited afterwards, only reversed. This night audit checklist gives you the order to work in, what each step protects, and what the morning manager should find on the desk.

What is night audit, and what must be settled before the date changes?#

Night audit is the end-of-day procedure that closes the hotel's business date: it reconciles rooms, charges and money, records the decisions that cannot be taken later, and rolls the system to the next day. The business date is the date the system attributes transactions to, which is not always the calendar date. Most hotel systems let the hotel decide when the business date ends, and hotels differ; this is common practice, not a definition fixed by a standard.

Order matters because once the date rolls, a posting lands on the new day and yesterday's totals are frozen. A mistake is then fixed by a reversal dated later, never by editing the closed day. For a fuller picture of the pieces, see how one hotel business day fits together.

Reconcile before you post: arrivals expected against arrivals checked in, departures expected against departures checked out, the in-house count against rooms shown occupied, and room status against the housekeeping report. Walk the discrepancy list first. A room showing occupied with no guest, or a guest with no room, changes what you are about to post, so posting before it is resolved means posting twice.

Write down the starting numbers: in-house count, rooms occupied, arrivals, departures. The morning pack can then show the shape of the day, not just its totals. Do not start posting while the in-house list is unresolved. A short delay costs minutes; a wrong posting costs a reversal and an explanation.

How do you handle no-shows and late arrivals before the roll?#

Decide each one before the date changes: a no-show is a money decision, charge or release, taken under the reservation's own terms, and a late arrival checked in after midnight must be posted to the business date your hotel's rule assigns it to. Separate the two cases. A no-show is a guest who has neither arrived nor cancelled; a late arrival is a guest who is coming, just after midnight. They carry different money consequences and different evidence.

Read the reservation before deciding: the guarantee, the cancellation policy and any agency contract decide whether the first night can be charged. The hotel's own policy decides who is allowed to approve a release instead. Know what each choice does to inventory: releasing the room returns it to sale for the remaining nights; charging keeps that night out of inventory and turns the reservation into revenue.

Record the decision in a form a stranger can follow: guest name, reservation number, who decided, what was charged or released, and where the supporting evidence sits. Be consistent about the late arrival. A guest arriving at 01:30 belongs either to the night that has just ended or to the one starting, depending on the hotel's business-date rule; the room-night count and the rate posting both follow that choice.

If an overbooking forces a guest to be relocated, log it as its own event with its own record. Handling a walk is hotel practice; this article states no legal rule for it.

How do you post room and board charges and check each rate against its reservation?#

Post from the reservation, not from memory: each night's room charge and each board or package element should match what the reservation sold, and any difference is corrected by void and reverse before the date rolls. Check the rate against its source: rate code, package, agency or contracted rate, and any agreed discount. The reservation is the evidence; the posting is only the copy.

Post what the reservation sold, not what the guest used. A half-board guest who skipped dinner still bought half board, and the package element is posted as sold. Handle accommodation tax as its own line: Article 34 of Law No. 6802 requires it to be shown separately on the facility's invoices and similar documents and keeps it outside the VAT base (mevzuat.gov.tr, Gider Vergileri Kanunu, Article 34 (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01). The rate and the scope are questions for your accountant.

Flag complimentary and house-use rooms at the moment of posting. STR's benchmarking guidelines count only revenue-generating rooms as rooms sold, exclude complimentary rooms, and ask for rooms revenue net of rebates, refunds, allowances, overcharges and taxes (CoStar Group, Historical Benchmarking Data Reporting Guidelines (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01).

Correct by void and reverse, never by deletion. A deleted line leaves no trace of who removed it or why, and the morning cannot reconstruct it. For the mechanics, see how to void a folio charge without breaking the audit trail. Spot-check a rotating sample of folios against their reservations each night instead of reading all of them; a sample that moves covers the month without costing the whole night.

What must reconcile in cash, card, deposits and foreign currency?#

Four things must agree before the roll: the cash drawer against the system's cash, the card terminal batch against the system's card total, deposits and prepayments against the folios they belong to, and every foreign-currency payment against the rate the hotel's written policy names. Count the drawer with a second person present or a camera in view, and record the count itself, not only the difference. A recorded count can be checked; a remembered one cannot.

Close the card terminal batch and compare per card type. A terminal total that differs from the system usually means a posting made after the batch closed, or a payment posted to the wrong folio. Check that every deposit and prepayment is applied to the reservation it was taken for. An unapplied deposit is a liability sitting in the wrong place, not revenue.

Know how the Central Bank's rates work. TCMB sets its indicative foreign-exchange and banknote rates once each business day at 15:30, announces them the same day, publishes them in the Resmî Gazete the next day, and sets none at weekends, public holidays or half working days (TCMB, "Gösterge Niteliğindeki Kurlar" (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01). Know what those rates are not: TCMB states that its indicative rates bind no person or institution, and that in transactions between parties other than the Central Bank the parties themselves decide which rate applies (same source). That is why the hotel needs a written policy naming the rate it uses.

Record the rate and its source on the folio, not just the converted amount. Which rate applies for tax or invoice purposes is your accountant's call, and this article does not make it. Fix the rounding rule once, for example how many decimals the conversion carries, and apply it the same way every night so small differences do not accumulate into an unexplained one.

Which exception reports should you read before closing?#

Read the reports that show what people did by hand: voids and corrections, rate overrides, complimentary and house-use rooms, open folios, and in-house guests without an identity notification. For each void, check who did it, when, on which folio, and whether the reversing entry exists. A void without its reverse is an open question, not a closed one.

Rate overrides and discounts: compare each against the reservation and against the approval limit. The report is short in a well-run hotel and long in a hotel with a problem. Complimentary and house-use rooms: each should carry a name and a reason, because these rooms leave the revenue count and someone has to own that.

Open folios: departing guests with a balance, in-house folios with no movement, and balances that should have moved to a company or agency account. A city ledger transfer can look like a payment if nobody checks; see how the city ledger works when agencies and companies are invoiced.

Identity notification: Law No. 1774 requires the responsible operators of hotels and similar lodging places to keep identity and arrival-departure records day by day for everyone they give a bed to, domestic or foreign, paid or free, and to keep them ready for inspection at any time; an additional article requires these records to be kept on computer day by day and reported instantly by connecting to law-enforcement terminals (mevzuat.gov.tr, Kimlik Bildirme Kanunu, consolidated text (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01). Keep the night audit check narrow: every in-house guest has a notification. The law's wording is "day by day" and "instantly"; this article states no deadline and no penalty beyond that, and your process should be confirmed with your own adviser.

On the fiscal side, Law No. 3100 describes fiscal cash registers as devices that give a sales receipt for every sale and a daily closing receipt (mevzuat.gov.tr, Kanun No. 3100 (opens in a new tab), 2026-11-01), so the day's closing receipt belongs in the pack. Seasonal properties will find a wider set of duties in the pre-season compliance checklist.

When the totals do not balance, where do you look first?#

Work from the smallest, most local number outward: count the drawer again, then the terminal batch, then the posting journal by department, then the folio list. Most differences are timing or a posting on the wrong folio, not a missing payment. Re-count before investigating; a second count costs two minutes and removes the most common cause of a short drawer.

Check the timing cut: anything posted after the terminal batch closed, or after the report was run, sits on one side of the comparison and not the other. Look for a duplicate posting and for its missing reverse; two identical charges with one reversal is a correction half done. Check conversions: the same amount at two different rates produces a small difference that looks like a cash problem and is not one.

Check deposits not applied, payments posted to the wrong guest, and balances moved to a company or agency account, which can read as a payment received. Never plug the difference with a miscellaneous charge or a correction posting. An unexplained difference that is written down and escalated is honest; a plugged one hides the cause and repeats next month.

Rolling the date: what should the morning manager find on the desk?#

A one-page pack: the day's totals, the variance list with explanations, the decisions taken with names, the unresolved discrepancies with owners, and the open folios. The manager should read it in five minutes and know what needs a decision today. Every figure in the pack should trace to a report the auditor can name. A number without a source is an opinion.

The decisions section carries the night's judgment calls: no-shows charged or released, overrides approved, comps granted, walks handled, each with a name. The unresolved section carries what the auditor could not close, with an owner and a date. Nothing is dropped because the shift ended.

Confirm the roll itself: the business date advanced, the day's reports were stored, and the pack was signed and timestamped before the auditor left the desk. Do not roll the date to start fresh while a discrepancy is open. The discrepancy does not disappear; it only becomes harder to find against a newer day. Keep the pack's shape the same every night. A manager who reads the same five sections each morning notices the day something is missing.

Write your order down before you need it#

Write your own hotel's order down as one page, in the sequence above, and run it on a quiet Tuesday before you need it on a sold-out Saturday. The parts fit together as one chain: the pre-start reconciliation decides what you post, the posting decides what reconciles, the reconciliation decides what the exception reports mean, and the pack is what lets someone who was not there check the whole night. The next step is to draft that page this week and time one full run against it.