You can’t fix your business problems until you know exactly what they are.
Auditing gets a bad rap, partially because of the word itself – it’s intimidating and a bit scary. Who wants to have someone poking through their work? However, it is a critical tool in measuring the success and utilization of our systems, our teams, and our results. We need to insure the information we report accurately reflects our successes and opportunities.
When working with a client or hotel group for the first time, my initial recommendation is almost always to audit. We need to understand where we’re starting and determine a baseline. From here, we can develop a plan by identifying the most critical areas aligned with the company’s goals.
During an audit process for one hotel, it became clear that the revenue in their primary sales system was grossly inflated, reflecting approximately 30% more revenue than what was actualized on the P&L. This was caused by a system interface issue that affected all the other hotels in the collection. At the time, the company was not using their data for any automated reporting or production tracking–everything was done manually, so the issue went unnoticed. Once we corrected the underlying problem and the historical data affected by it, the company was successfully able to leverage their data to automate reports, assess performance, and evaluate account production.
But what if we hadn’t noticed? What if we’d gone ahead with building a data warehouse, automating reports and using this information to make important business decisions? The ramifications of utilizing inaccurate information can be significant.
Auditing is just a way of illuminating the condition of our data, looking under the hood, and performing a diagnostic exercise. Think of it as your yearly checkup: assess the health of your systems, determine the causes of any inefficiencies and treat.
Happy auditing!