What is Night Audit?
The night audit is the hotel's nightly close: a structured process — typically around 10 steps, that reconciles the day's transactions, posts room and tax charges, balances departments, and rolls the system date so the next business day can begin.
What the audit actually does
Between roughly 11pm and 3am, the night auditor verifies that everything charged, paid, or adjusted during the day agrees across the PMS, the payment processor, and the ledgers. Room and tax post to every occupied room; discrepancies get investigated while they're hours old, not weeks.
The 10-step close
Most properties run a variant of the same sequence: pre-audit checks, pending-transaction cleanup, room-and-tax posting, department balancing, credit-card settlement, no-show processing, report generation, backup, date roll, and handover. The Night Audit Workflow course in the LMS Systems catalog walks all ten steps in 56 minutes.
Why it's a training bottleneck
Night audit knowledge traditionally lives in one person's head, and hotels discover the cost when that person leaves. Structured training that gets a finance clerk shadowing a live audit by Day 5 removes the single point of failure.
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