Reading your Protel nightly close report
If your Protel property has one document that gets read every day of the year, it is the nightly close report. Yet in most properties, one person reads it end-to-end (usually the controller), and everyone else skims. Here is what a good read looks like.
The Protel nightly close is generated once the night audit script has completed. It arrives as a PDF (or a stack of PDFs) usually before 06:00 local time, and covers the previous operating day. There are five sections worth actually reading:
Trial balance. This is the single most important page. It shows total revenue, total payments, total ledger movements, and — the number your controller cares about — the deferred deposit balance. If the trial balance does not tie by a single cent, something is wrong. Do not skip forward; open a ticket with your Protel administrator before the day starts.
Revenue by outlet. Room revenue, F&B revenue by outlet, spa revenue, telephone (yes, still), miscellaneous. Compare against yesterday and against the same day last week. Sudden drops without an obvious operational reason (a comp'd banquet, a closure) are worth chasing before they compound.
City-ledger ageing. Any account over 90 days should be on your radar; over 120 days should be in a call with the sales team. Left alone, city ledger becomes bad debt very quickly, and Protel will not chase it for you.
Cashier reports. One per cashier drawer, showing float, drops, cash in, cash out. Cash discrepancies over the property's tolerance (usually 5 euro) should be logged with a short written explanation the same day. Not because your cashiers are dishonest — they almost never are — but because a habit of unexplained cash drift is how real losses hide.
Payment ledger. Every payment posted in the day, by method, with an auto-total per method. Reconcile against the acquirer statement for card payments (the following business day), and against the bank statement for transfers. If your property posts to DATEV or another accounting package, this is where the export begins — our Nightly Trial Balance module packages exactly these sections and emails them at 06:30.
The habit of reading the close every day is what separates the properties where finance is calm from the ones where it is a monthly panic. It takes ten minutes; do not skip it.