It’s been long that I have written any thing. Actually I was doing a research on Hotel Industry and me during my research I came across few Buzzwords commonly used in Hotel Management systems. I have taken reference from many sites, Books, reference materials, articles etc.

Believe me it took me more than a week to collate and validate all the points I have written below. Just wanted to share this information about hotel industry and hotel management systems with you all. Hope it will be helpful.

Buzzwords - Hotel Management Systems

1. KOT

KOT is the Kitchen Order Tickets. The KOT contains details such as table number, items ordered and its quantity. In the billing division, it is the table number through which the corresponding KOTs are identified. Suppose if a guest of a particular table orders 4 times, 4 different KOTs are prepared for that table and the total amount is obtained by the summation of all the KOTs of that table.

2. BOT

Through the use of the favorite’s button, bartenders can select from a few drink presets, each of which can replace an entire category of drinks, allowing for extremely fast order entry in a fast paced environments. Users of terminals where servers enter food orders use the normal bar menu so that prep tickets are generated at the bar for drink orders.

3. DNR

Hotel management wants to serve the guests in the best possible way. At the same time it wants to remember some unwanted guests too. The program has facility to mark a guest with some DNR reason. All the future transaction with that guest will be denied by the system unless the reason is removed for that particular guest.

4. PTD

Information on how your portfolio has performed on a one-day, month-to-date (MTD) and year-to-date (YTD) basis

5. YTD

The period beginning January 1st of the current year up until todays date

6. MTD

First of the running month till today's date

For Example:

# Units/Shares: Total number of units held at the report date.

Market Value ($): Number of units/shares multiplied by current unit/share price.

One Day / $ Gain/Loss: Market value as of the date shown on the report minus market value for the previous business day.

One Day / % Return: Percent return of the holding (as of the date shown on the report) since the previous business day.

MTD / $ Gain/Loss: The gain or loss on your investment since the close of the last business day of the previous month.

MTD / % Return: Percent return of the holding since the close of the last business day of the previous month. If you have bought or sold units of this holding during this period of time, the calculation of gain/loss takes these transactions into account using the internal rate of return (IRR) algorithm.

YTD / $ Gain/Loss: The gain or loss on your investment since the close of the last business day of the previous year.

YTD / % Return: Percent return of holding since the beginning of the year. If you have bought or sold units of this holding during this period of time, the calculation of gain/loss takes these transactions into account using the internal rate of return (IRR) algorithm.

7. ADR

ADR is one of the commonly used financial indicators in hotel industry to measure how well a hotel performs compared to its competitors and itself (year over year). It is common in the hotel industry for the ADR to gradually increase year over year bringing in more revenue. However, ADR itself is not enough to measure the performance of the hotel. One should combine ADR, occupancy and RevPar (revenue per available room) to make a sound judgment on hotel performance.

Average Daily Rate formula is room’s revenue earned divided by number of rooms that earned revenue. House use and complimentary rooms are excluded from the denominators.

However, many hotels calculate ADR or ARR (Average Room Rate) using the formula: Room Income/ (No. of rooms sold + Complimentary rooms) i.e. 'House Use' rooms are excluded. The logic for including complimentary rooms is that they are given for business reasons e.g. x rooms complimentary over y paid rooms as part of a business deal. This implies that the inclusion of this free unit is actually an inclusion in the revenue deal. 'House Use' rooms or those occupied by hotel employees or management are excluded as they are not available for sale and not generating income.

8. Folio

Manner of referring in a journal or ledger to the origination or disposition of the item. For example, if in the Cash Disbursements Journal a debit was made to rent expense having the account number 101, then the number 101 would be put in the folio reference column of the journal.

9. Night Audits and Night Auditors

Night Audit is a common activity which is carried out by authorized persons such as Admin or Auditor. That is you must be privileged to audit. The auditor at the end of the day can do the audit on hotel transaction activities carried out on that day and get back to the management if found something improper. The softwares do not force the auditor to audit routinely, that is daily, but logically he cannot proceed the auditing for forthcoming days unless he finishes auditing for the previous days. The auditor can do audit for exactly one day at a time and exactly once.

10.Room Blocking

A way to block routine room operations for maintenance purpose. This is ‘Room Blocking’ feature. Once a room is blocked, it can’t be available for any room level operation.

11.Bad Debt operation

Bad debt is the portion of receivables that can no longer be collected, typically from accounts receivable or loans. Bad debt in accounting is considered as an expense.

Accounts receivable that will likely remain uncollectable and will be written off. Bad debts appear as an expense on the company's income statement, thus reducing net income. In general, companies make an estimate of bad debt expenses that might be incurred in the current time period based on past records as part of the process of estimating earnings. Most companies make a bad debt allowance since it is unlikely that all of their debtors will pay them in full.

Hotel may have to bare some unrecoverable due in the business. The software allows marking such bad debt at individual check in level. It provides list of non zero balanced transaction and user can select and mark such transaction as bad debt.

12.Call Accounting System

Hotels make more sophisticated use of call accounting systems than many corporate entities. First, hotels require real-time processing from their call accounting systems. Also, while corporate call accounting systems largely provide departmental chargeback, call accounting systems in hospitality provide more sophisticated chargeback and markup algorithms for revenue based resale of phone services to targeted visitors, staff, partners, and guests. Also, the hospitality industry frequently leverages centralized enterprise call accounting and fully managed call accounting services as hoteliers often lack on-property staff that can operate on-premise systems and seek simplicity and bottom line cost savings. TSPS were an early method of providing such service.

For any queries do write to me.......

Regards,

Vipul Sood