How We Digitized the Night Audit Process
By Stephen German, Senior Vice President Product Management at Actabl
A couple of years ago, I was with a client hotel in Boston, working on our housekeeping and engineering solution together. As we were finishing up some of our research, I stopped the assistant general manager and asked her, “If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing that you would fix?"
She explained that every night, as part of the night audit process, she would print off up to 60 pages for the report. She told me: “I go through them, I write on them, I red-line them, and then I pass them over to the GM. After that, I have to scan it all back in and send it as an email as well. If anyone has a problem with it, if anyone wants to change anything, I have to print it all out again and I have to start all over.”
I just thought to myself, ‘Wow, that is an incredible amount of manual effort.’ We had all this information that we could make digital. We could make all that printing a thing of the past. We could actually make that magic wish a reality.
Identifying the Challenges of a Night Audit
Beyond the reams of paper, there were other operational hurdles to overcome. The night auditor needed the process to provide the ability to leave comments, sign off and go through multiple approvals. From a management company level, you also needed the ability and the confidence to know that this was being done and have an easy way to see the:
- Hotels that have completed the night audit
- Hotels that were missing
- Hotels that need review
- Quick access to completed packets for audits
Creating Digital Night Audit
Our goal with Digital Night Audit was to digitize the whole process. This is how we tackled it:
- Provide portfolio-wide visibility for all the night audit packets
- Enable GMs and leadership to see submissions across properties in real time
- Track all the submissions, edits, comments and approvals
With Digital Night Audit, we provide hotels with instant access to their data. If you need a packet from six months ago, you can quickly find the digitized files and can get access to exactly what you want, rather than searching through pages and pages of files.
We have customized automation. Users can tailor workflows to their property type and their brand standards.
The Benefits of Digital Night Audit
There's a tremendous amount of time savings in not having to pass these paper packets from one person to the next, or scanning and sending them to a corporate office so that the report becomes readily available for all users.
For management companies, it means instant visibility into audit activity across properties. No more chasing updates or relying on inconsistent processes. Now, completion rates, exceptions, and approvals can all be monitored seamlessly from a single dashboard.
With Digital Night Audit, finding audit records is instant. There’s no more digging through storage boxes or sifting through stacks of paper. Every report is digitally archived and easily searchable, ensuring effortless compliance reviews and quick access to specific reports from any date. So, if you ever end up in an external audit or end up needing to find anything in that mountain of paperwork, the digital solution now lets you find that very quickly.
And another really great benefit of Digital Night Audit is that it is eco friendly. You're not printing all of these reports. You're saving not only money on the ink and paper, but you're saving trees.
Learn more about how Actabl can help you automate the night audit process to streamline operations, reduce compliance risk, and gain instant oversight across every property. Click here.
