Webinar Recap: 3 Things You Need to Know About Going Paperless with Hotel Night Audit
As a hotel owner or operator, there are numerous struggles with the outdated practice of printing night audit reports. These reports are causing your hotels to print hundreds, or even thousands, of documents each night. This process is not only inefficient but also harmful to the environment.
After the night audit reports are printed, they are stored either on or off property for years to come. In the event that a manager would need to find a report from years past, he or she is likely doomed to a day of digging through bank boxes full of wasted paper. The solution to the old fashioned system of printing is simple - paperless night audit.
Does this photo look all too familiar? If this image reflects your current night audit process, you’ve come to the right place.
Today’s innovative hotel operators think of cloud storage as the ‘blocking and tackling’ of their data strategy. The first phase of creating a comprehensive data strategy is to move your data storage and management into the cloud.
Recently, Jason Freed and Rory Sampair led an informative and interactive conversation about these struggles hoteliers are facing and the benefits of bringing your night audit process paperless. Here are 3 key learnings from the webinar:
- Hotels can increase efficiency through automation
While there are plenty of tools in the virtual world that allow for companies to securely store documents on the cloud, users often have issues with recalling certain data from such vast storage. Today’s back office teams need to get more done with fewer resources. USB and Cloud drives act only as storage units, and often documents will sit for long periods of time with no action. Should your documents need to go through approval and signature processes and ultimately delivered to a central location, there are more efficient tools available. Moving your critical documents and data into a digital document management system automates most of those processes.
- Moving documents into secure cloud storage ensures hotels stay compliant
Hotels are required to keep records with payment, guest, and other secure information - moving these documents to a secure cloud ensures you’ve got all the necessary documents easily accessible should you need to access key financial information. Today’s solution providers keep their environments up to date with the latest security patches and conduct regular vulnerability scans. Data should be stored separate from applications to safeguard from impacting data should a system server go down.
- Going paperless will reduce your environmental footprint
One of the most important benefits of the paperless night audit is that your hotel is saving not only time and money but also the environment. The average hotelier that goes digital instead of a printed night audit system saves over 15,000 trees per year. Many hotel operators have reported that sustainability efforts weigh heavily on decision making for new business-travel bookings.
Solutions to help you go paperless are out there
Rory Sampair, Otelier Solutions Engineer, has become an expert in helping hoteliers navigate converting their night audit systems to cloud oriented solutions such as Otelier DigiAudit. DigiAudit is a one-stop-shop for uploading night audits, recording new data, and recalling data from old reports using optical character recognition. In case you are still interested in learning about the benefits of a Paperless Night Audit, watch our webinar recording here, and subscribe to Otelier to make sure you don’t miss out on the rest of our Data Management Webinar series!
