Zitlin runs the night audit as a checklist, not a batch job. It finds the arrivals nobody checked in, the folios nobody invoiced, and the invoices nobody settled — then freezes the day's occupancy and revenue into a permanent record you can look back on months later.
Ask a hotelier what the night audit is for and you will usually get the accounting answer: it closes the books for the day. Ask what actually goes wrong and you get a different list. A walk-in was given a room but never checked in, so the room shows vacant. A guest left at 6am and the folio was never invoiced. Someone forgot to add a rate for the extra night. None of these are accounting problems at the time they happen — they become accounting problems three weeks later, when nobody remembers what happened.
Zitlin's night audit is built around that reality. It is not a batch job that posts room charges at 2am. It is a checklist that finds the loose ends from the day just gone, lets you fix them, and then freezes the day's numbers into a record that does not change.
What Is a Night Audit?
The night audit is the end-of-day reconciliation that closes a hotel's business day. It verifies that every arriving guest was checked in, every departing guest was checked out and invoiced, every occupied room was charged for the night, and every payment was recorded — then fixes the day's occupancy and revenue figures in place so later edits cannot quietly rewrite history.
In large hotels this is done overnight by a dedicated night auditor, which is where the name comes from. In an independent hotel or guesthouse there is rarely a night shift to spare, so the task either falls to whoever is on duty or does not get done at all. Zitlin is built for the second case: the system does the finding, a person spends a few minutes on the fixing.
The Five Checks Zitlin Runs Before You Close
Open the night audit for any date and Zitlin computes the full picture on demand. Every row links directly to the folio or reservation it refers to, so fixing an item is one click, not a search.
| Check | What it catches | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Pending arrivals | Reservations due to arrive that day with no check-in recorded | The room reads as vacant when someone is sleeping in it — and it can be sold twice |
| Pending departures | Guests past their departure date with no check-out recorded | Overstays hold inventory that should be back on sale; capped to the last three days so you see the live backlog, not years of history |
| Unfinished folios | Guests who checked out that day but were never invoiced | Revenue earned and not billed — the single most common leak in a small property |
| Unsettled invoices | Room and room-service invoices raised that day, still unpaid | Your real outstanding position for the day, before it disappears into the month |
| Missing nightly rates | In-house reservations with no rate for that night | A night with no price is a night with no revenue; hourly folios are correctly excluded |
Zitlin also tells you whether the previous day was closed, so a gap in the sequence is visible immediately rather than discovered at month end.
Your Entire Property, in Your Pocket.
Close the Day — and Keep What It Looked Like
When the checklist is clean — or clean enough, because you decide, not the software — you close the day. Zitlin writes a permanent snapshot containing:
- Occupancy for the day: rooms occupied and occupancy percentage
- Revenue totals and the amount still unsettled
- A count of anything left unresolved at the moment of closing, so an imperfect close is recorded honestly rather than hidden
- Your notes — the free-text box for the context no report captures: a walk-in paid in cash, a group extended, a refund is pending
- Who closed it and exactly when
Money in the snapshot is stored as exact decimal values, never floating-point. A snapshot taken tonight still reconciles to the cent when you open it in three years.
A Soft Close, Not a Lock
This is the design decision that matters most, and it is worth being explicit about: closing a day in Zitlin does not lock anything.
No record becomes read-only. No report stops updating. If an invoice is corrected next week, every live report reflects the correction immediately, as it should.
What the close gives you is a fixed reference point. The snapshot says what the day looked like when you signed off on it. The live reports say what it looks like now. When those two disagree, you have found something worth looking at — and that is far more useful than a system that simply refuses to let you fix a mistake.
If a day was closed in error, a manager with admin rights can reopen it, make the corrections, and close it again.
No-Shows, Cleared in One Action
Every reservation that was due to arrive and never checked in is already sitting in your checklist. Select the ones that never turned up and mark them no-show together.
Zitlin updates the reservation status and immediately pushes the freed availability to your connected OTAs through the channel manager. Rooms that were held for guests who never arrived go back on sale that night, not the next time someone notices. For a property running close to full, this is often the single most valuable minute of the whole audit.
Only reservations that genuinely qualify can be marked — confirmed bookings, never checked in, and already past their arrival date. A future booking cannot be marked no-show by accident.
Who Can Do What
| Action | Required access |
|---|---|
| Run the checklist for any date | Rooms manager and above |
| Close a business day | Rooms manager and above |
| Mark reservations as no-show | Rooms manager and above |
| View audit history and past snapshots | Rooms manager and above |
| Reopen a closed day | Administrator only |
Reopening is deliberately the narrowest permission in the feature. Everything else your duty manager can do; unwinding a signed-off day is an owner's decision.
Audit History
Every closed day is listed with its date, who closed it, occupancy, revenue, the amount left unsettled, and any notes. Open any date to see the full snapshot as it was recorded.
This is what turns the night audit from a chore into an asset. Six months on, "why was the 14th so soft?" is answerable in seconds — including the note your duty manager left that night explaining that a group cancelled.
Manual Night Audit vs Zitlin
| Manual / spreadsheet | Legacy PMS batch audit | Zitlin night audit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finding unbilled folios | By memory or eyeballing a list | Sometimes | Automatic, every day |
| Catching missed check-ins | Usually next morning, by accident | Rarely | Automatic, with a link to fix |
| Missing nightly rates | Found at month end, if at all | Rarely | Automatic |
| No-show processing | Manual, per reservation | Manual | Bulk, with OTA availability pushed |
| Must run at a fixed hour | No | Yes, typically | No — close whenever suits your shift |
| Locks the books | No | Usually yes | No — soft close, corrections stay possible |
| Historical record | Whatever was written down | Report re-run from current data | Immutable snapshot of the day as closed |
| Needs a night auditor | Yes, in practice | Yes | No |
Who This Is For
Independent hotels and guesthouses without a night shift. The audit stops being something that needs a person awake at 3am and becomes a five-minute task at the end of the evening.
Properties with high walk-in volume. Walk-ins are where check-ins get skipped and folios go unbilled. Those are precisely the two things the checklist catches first.
Multi-property groups. Each property closes against its own local business day, and each has its own audit history — while owners see all of them from one login.
Anyone who has ever found an unbilled folio weeks later. That is the entire feature, really.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a night audit in a hotel? The night audit is the end-of-day reconciliation a hotel runs to close its business day. It confirms every arriving guest was checked in, every departing guest was checked out and invoiced, every room was charged for the night, and every payment was recorded — then locks in the day's occupancy and revenue figures so later edits cannot quietly rewrite history. Traditionally it is run overnight by a night auditor, which is where the name comes from.
Does Zitlin run the night audit automatically at a fixed time? No, and that is deliberate. Zitlin does the finding automatically — it computes the full checklist for any date on demand — but a person presses close. An unattended batch job that closes a day with eight unbilled folios in it does not fix anything, it just records the mess. A one-person guesthouse can close three days at once on a Monday morning; a busy property can close every night at 11pm. Both work.
What does Zitlin check before I can close the day? Five things: reservations due to arrive that were never checked in; guests past their departure date who were never checked out; folios for guests who checked out but were never invoiced; room and room-service invoices raised that day that are still unpaid; and in-house reservations missing a rate for that night. Each item links straight to the folio or reservation so you can fix it and re-run the check.
Does closing a day lock my records? No. Zitlin's night audit is a soft close. Nothing is frozen or made read-only, and every report stays live. What the close creates is a permanent snapshot of what the day looked like at the moment it was closed, so if figures change later you can see both versions rather than losing the original.
Can I reopen a day that was closed by mistake? Yes. A manager with admin rights can reopen any closed day, which removes the snapshot and lets the day be closed again once corrections are made. Staff with front-desk or rooms-manager access can run and close the audit but cannot reopen a closed day.
How does Zitlin handle no-shows during the night audit? Any reservation that was due to arrive and never checked in appears in the checklist, and you can mark several as no-show in one action. Zitlin updates the reservation status and immediately pushes the freed availability to your connected OTAs through the channel manager, so the rooms go back on sale without a separate step.
What is stored in the night audit snapshot? The day's occupancy — rooms occupied and occupancy percentage — its revenue totals and unsettled amounts, and a count of anything still unresolved when you closed. Money is stored as exact decimal values, never floating point, so a snapshot taken today still reconciles to the cent years later. Your notes and the name of the person who closed the day are stored with it.
What business day does the night audit use? Midnight to midnight in your property's own timezone — the calendar day your staff and your accountant already work to. Multi-property groups in different timezones each close against their own local day.
Can two staff members close the same day at once? Only one will succeed. If two clerks press close on the same date at the same moment, the database guarantees a single audit record per day and the second attempt is refused with a clear message rather than creating a duplicate.
Do I need a dedicated night auditor to use this? No. The point of the checklist is that the system does the finding, so the task no longer needs a specialist on a night shift. Most independent properties using Zitlin close the day at the end of the evening shift or the next morning.
Is night audit included in the free plan? Yes. Night audit, the daily checklist, and audit history are part of Zitlin's core property management features.
