Hotel Industry
About two weeks ago I took a job as a night auditor at a local hotel, the Victoria Inn. They are part of a five-hotel chain by the same name, and owned by a larger conglomerate. The job is a combination of accounting - making sure all of the paperwork has been done, and front desk work - checking people in all the time.
I can say that this has been a real eye-opener. At least the work. The hours (11:00 pm to 7:00 am) are not eye-opening.
The night auditor position for our hotel takes a fair bit of work, primarily because we are actually running three completely independent sections (4, actually). First, there is the normal hotel stuff - checkins. We need to balance all of the receipts to bills and ensure that everything lines up nicely.
Next, we need to manage the banquet portion of the hotel. This is largely conference services. Unfortunately, they use a different piece of software to manage their work, so we need to put all of their data - by hand - into the main hotel system. This takes some time - typicaly half an hour.
Finally, we manage the restaurant. This involves more work than the hotel itself because there are more reciepts to balance, plus room charges which need to be accounted for by each server. Screw up one addition and you need to start over.
We also manage the attached-but-separate sports bar. However, all we have to do for that is photocopy one sheet and fax it. That doesn’t really count.
The job is quite peculiar. When we start our shift, there is usually a number of people left to check in, as well as complaints to address. This typically takes half an hour to get straightened out. Then we can start crunching numbers.
I like to start by posting all of the bnaquet bills. This is followed by adding up all of the hotel credit card receipts. Then we wait.
The bar closes at roughly 1:00 in the morning so we have to wait for them to handle the restaurant. Once they are out we add up and check all of their paper work. Done. Finally, we need to add up the hotel bills and compare them to reports. If everything looks good, we charge people who haven’t shown up and procede to run the system audit. This posts all charges for the rooms to the accounts. Lost more reports are printed out.
In short, we work franticly from 11:00 - 12:00. Then we wait until about 2:00. We then work franticly until about 3:00 and then wait around until about 5:00.
At about 5:00, people start waking up and checking out. We also need to patch people through to housekeeping if people are calling in sick. We tend to take bets as to what time the first sick phone call will come in.
This job is really fun. I get to deal with people while holding the responsability of managing a large amount of money for the hotel.