Guide
What is night audit in hotels?
Night audit is the daily close of a hotel. It posts the day’s room charges and taxes, reconciles payments against the cashier’s shift, rolls the business date forward and locks the day’s revenue so reporting has a fixed number to stand on.
Why hotels close a day at all
A hotel never stops trading. Guests check in at midnight, the restaurant posts a charge at 1am, a late payment lands at 3am. Without a defined cut-off there is no such thing as "yesterday’s revenue" — the number changes every time someone refreshes the report.
The night audit draws that line. Everything before it belongs to the closed day and cannot move; everything after belongs to the new one. That is what makes occupancy, ADR and RevPAR comparable from one day to the next.
What the night audit actually does
A complete close covers roughly these steps:
- Post room charges and applicable taxes to every occupied room’s folio.
- Reconcile payments taken during the day against the cashier’s shift.
- Resolve no-shows and unconfirmed departures so room status is accurate.
- Finalise the day’s revenue and produce the manager’s report.
- Roll the business date forward so new activity lands on the next day.
The business date is not the calendar date
This is the part that quietly breaks reporting in a lot of systems. A hotel’s business date is not "whatever today is on the server". It is the operating day the property is currently in, and it only advances when the audit runs.
If a property closes at 3am, the charges posted at 1am belong to the previous business date, not to the new calendar date that technically began two hours earlier. A system that reads the local clock instead of the business date will file those charges on the wrong day, and the revenue report will not match the folios.
Checkaut runs the close against the property’s own business date rather than the server clock, so a late audit still lands on the correct day.
Can night audit be automated?
Largely, yes — and the manual version is where errors enter. Posting charges by hand across fifty rooms at 2am is exactly the task humans are worst at.
What automation should not remove is the review. The value of the close is partly that somebody looks at the day’s exceptions: unbalanced folios, disputed charges, rooms showing occupied with no registered guest. A good system does the arithmetic and surfaces the exceptions; it does not silently absorb them.
Frequently asked
What time should night audit run?
Most properties run it between 1am and 4am, at the quietest point of the day. The exact hour matters less than consistency — a close that moves around makes day-on-day comparison unreliable.
What happens if night audit is not run?
The business date does not advance, so the next day’s charges post to the previous day. Revenue reports overstate one day and understate the next, and room status can drift out of sync with housekeeping.
Does night audit lock invoices?
It finalises the day’s revenue. In Checkaut an issued invoice stays intact after the close — any correction is recorded through a controlled credit note with a visible trail, rather than by editing the original document.
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