Cashiering

Cashiering is the nucleus of guest billing which accounts for all the transactions happening inside a hotel. It is a centralized point where expenditures made by every guest are converted into bills at the time of their check-out. Cashiering is a critical part of the Front Office department as it is a continuous process and a job of accuracy.

Cashiering module, hotel accounting software under HotelDesk, has the following functions:

In-house Guest details

Contains information on the stay of each guest such as Name, Room number, Check-in and Check-out dates, Room type, and Room plan. This data can be exported as .xls, .pdf files for accounting purposes.

Postings

Postings are the records/ entries of all the guest transactions and contain the amount of money payable by every guest towards their usage. Postings made to the hotel billing software are of many types

• Tariff — A tariff is a list of prices of rooms based on their type which is shown whenever a room number is entered. Tariffs can be edited on any given day against any room number whose editing access can be set under the Profile Master.


• Charge — A charge is an amount added to the final bill of a guest against a service availed by them inside the property and has to be paid during settlement. The usual charges that are added to the hotel bill are for the use of spa, shop, extra bed, room service among others.


• Paid Out — A paid out is the expense made by the hotel on behalf of the guest. It basically is the amount added to the final bill for anything bought from outside the hotel for e.g. taxi usage, utilities, medicines, doctor fees. Paid outs are paid from the cash drawers and posted to the final bill of the guest for a later settlement.


• Allowance — Allowances are the discounts offered to the guests by the hotel and get adjusted in the final bill during settlement. The instruments for which the hotels wish to give discounts can be altered anytime under the Master Setup.


• Miscellaneous Income — Income to be generated for services other than the regular ones such as swimming pool, spa, gym, and shop used by guests (other than in house guests) are posted as Miscellaneous Income.


• Advance — The advance amount paid by long stay guests or others during booking and reservation is covered here which is posted to the final bill. During settlement, only the remaining amount is collected from such guests.


• Expense — Includes the amount spent by the hotel for paid outs, bank transactions, and other payments.

It is to be noted that the postings (all but tariffs) can be cancelled at any time of the day but before the day end. However, the cancellation is password protected and the managers usually have access to it.

Tag Advance

Tag advance is the common advance amount paid by a group while check-in, which can be split and credited as separate entries to individual rooms before final billing. The total advance amount is split based on the number of rooms and the bills are paid separately.

Bill Splitting

Bills can be split day-wise and tariff-wise based on the individual needs of the guests. These get split into respective numbers when the required number of bills is entered into the system.

Settlement

Settlement is the final stage of the guest-hotel interaction cycle and includes overall transactions from the beginning to the end, the amount in credit, the amount debited and the balance amount. HotelDesk enables the users to create new payment modes other than the ones listed in the module; multiple payment modes can also be set.

Re-settlement

Re-settlement aids in changing the payment modes that were chosen during settlement. This includes multiple payment modes too.

Outstanding Collection

List of all the bills that are yet to be cleared by the travel agents and the corporate companies is mentioned as pending under this feature.

Cashier Shifts

Cashiering depending upon the shifts of several cashiers which aids in the shift-wise collection of cashiering reports and opening & closing balance among others. The shifts can be created based on the flexibility of the administration and permits grace hours too.

The cashiers can print the settlements, postings such as charges and allowances before the end of their shift and maintain cash books for shift transactions that make accounting easy during final settlements.

Night Audit

Front Office audits, generally referred to as Night audits because of the time of performing them, are essential in determining the reliability and accuracy of the hotel management system.

The audit is a daily review of the recorded guest transactions of the day and includes the tracking of opening & closing balance, updating daily tariffs, counting and tallying the cash flow, printing details of expenses and revenue, and collecting the status of each room among others.

The night audits play a key role in deciding the activities of the next day. Most importantly, any desired edits on any data have to be made before the commencement of the night audits, as it is not possible to edit any content at the completion of these audits.

In addition, the consumption levels of the electricity at the day end can be obtained through night audits. The system calculates the consumption based on the manually entered opening and closing readings.

The reports of the night audits can be generated daily or monthly, based on the needs of the management.