Editor’s note: After expanding to include a suite of data solutions for hotel owners and operators, MDO (myDigitalOffice) rebranded to become Otelier in February 2024. Please excuse any brand inconsistencies in the content below.
This article was originally published in Hospitality Upgrade.
Happy New Year! This week’s topic might sound less exciting than a New Year’s Eve party, and it is a long one. But stick with me and you will discover ways to collect what will be in some cases significant amounts of “found money” (and to improve your operations as well).
That topic is financial reconciliation. In a perfect world, hotels would not need this; every dollar and cent recorded in one system would be perfectly reflected in every other system. But we all know that in the world of hotels, no technology is perfect.
Financial reconciliation (as I will use the term here) is any process that can help to identify and resolve discrepancies that would otherwise cost money – wherever two systems ought to have the same number but do not. Commissions earned should equal commissions paid. Funds collected should equal bank deposits. Related to this is the ability to find transactions which, if not corrected, will result in paying more or collecting less than the hotel should, including for commissions and taxes.
There are other forms of reconciliation, such as analytical reconciliation, where a number or ratio does not make sense and you need to determine why (“reconcile” an apparent anomaly). But I will leave those for another day, and focus just on financial reconciliation, as defined above.
Financial reconciliation got my attention when I started seeing new vendors emerge in the last 18 months or so, typically focusing on one specific (and in many cases previously unrecognized) issue. I was shocked when I heard some of the revenue/expense recovery numbers, sometimes running into $10,000 or more per month for a full-service hotel, not to mention labor savings from eliminating manual processes.
Read the full article by Doug Rice on Hospitality Upgrade to learn how you may be leaving money on the table.
