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Hi Community, 

we do face some challenges with the end of the day time at midnight, and I’d like to check in with you if you have some best practices which might work out. 

In theory, we have no issues with the fact of closing the day at midnight, however, at a certain point we face operational issues to reconcile revenues with the POS system and BOF (Back office finance exports) If we would only consider MEWS its less of a problem, but with Export files for Finance and POS integrations, this makes all more complicated.

Cash drops are one example. The BOF exports capture all cash drops till midnight, if the outlets are closing late in the night, the cash drop which is reported in the export file does not reconcile with the physical cash drop, as this will be posted on the next day. The next day it balances out, but we do state a daily over/shortage on cash reporting, which Auditors do not accept. 

At the month's end, we also missed revenue posted after midnight which belongs to the month before, but MEWS does not consider it. Not to talk about the end of the year - we miss all revenue in the year which is posted after midnight. 

Well, we thought being smart and changing the time we report the revenue in the BOF File from 5 am to 5 am, that comes with a new problem. MEWS is posting all product revenue linked to reservations like breakfast, parking, etc. at midnight. Therefore we report those revenues on the wrong days now as well. 

Additionally, we have not figured out the best Editable History Window time, at the moment we use 16h which causes fewer problems. Last year MEWS change the behavior of posting additional services to midnight, which causes imbalance issues with the export file. 

  1. All accounting items belonging to the Bookable Service(s) have Check-in/Arrival time as offset for the Accounting Editable History Window (AEHW).
  2. All accounting items belonging to the Additional Service(s) have midnight (i.e. 12PM) as offset for the Accounting Editable History Window (AEHW)

So far I understand MEWS is not changing the midnight closure, how do you deal with the revenue exports? 

Do you have some best practise? 

And what is your EHW (Editable History Window) to make sure what is reported to the finance system can not be amended in MEWS afterwards anymore? 

Looking forward to your thoughts. 

@Nina  @willjordan @Jasmin H. @SabineSchr @Aam  Any helpful tips from any of you guys here for @ClaudiaM.  on how you navigate this situation? 🤔

I don’t have answers to all of your questions, but all stay service products (breakfast, etc.) should have an option to choose before midnight, or after midnight in the configuration, so that revenue will land on the day of your choosing. For any manual product posts, you can choose the date and time of the transaction as long as it’s within your editable history window, so you can also allocate that revenue to whatever date makes sense at the time of posting. In terms of revenue exports for reconciliations, if you are using the Mews Reservation Report, you should put your start time as your check-in time, and your end time as your check-out time. For example, if you are looking for all January revenue, you would set your filters to start January 1st at 3:00pm (check-in time), and end February 1st at 11:00am (check-out time). This for me was not intuitive, but once we set our filters that way, all the revenue aligned across various reports. It might be worth pushing Mews customer support for help with some of these issues, because I don’t think they are problems without solutions. Good luck!

Hi @ClaudiaM., 

 

I hope this information helps clarify our setup. We have a 1 day editable and operational window, and our financial extract runs 2 days behind.

Our properties also perform a shift close at midnight for cash transactions, although we are moving towards a cashless system so this is in decline. Our late-night bar POS is not integrated with Mews and revenue and payments are manually entered.

Can you share with us which integrated POS you are using and in what types of venues?

Thank you!

 

Thank you so much for your replies thats really appreciated.

@willjordan we already tried all possible time filters on the MEWS report, unfortunately changing the time stamp in MEWS to run the report does not fix the problem that the revenue is posted on an incorrect day for the finance export, unfortunately. 

@Mick yeah, I have been informed by MEWS several times to delay the export file by a day to capture all revenues, but this is not how hospitality finance works. There must be a way to capture all revenue the day after. So far I just have not figured out how.

Some of my clients are doing the same to close the cash before midnight. This is a workaround and not a solution to the problem, so somewhen this must be tackled. 

Other clients working with Lightspeed. Credit card is not a problem at all, only cash reconciliation. 

Lets see if somebody has any ideas on that, or further comments. 

Many thanks again for taking the time to reply. 

Thank you so much for your reply. 

@willjordan we have already tried every possible time stemp and day filter to reconcile our revenue, so far regardless which one we try, there is always somewhere revenue missing compared to other systems. 

@Mick  we have been asking by MEWS a few times to extend the EHW to 1 day, but this is financially a problem. There must be a solution to export the correct data on the next day and be able to reconcile it with the finance and POS System. At least is possible in all other PMS I know. 

Some customers are posting checks before midnight, this is a terrible workaround just to make your numbers correct. 
So far we have only been offered workarounds financially rather than solutions that we are working on for nearly 5 years now. We still hope to have a proper fix. 

Some of my clients are working with Lightspeed integration, and others have not integrated, or are pending and facing issues reconciling cash. Credit cards are not a problem though, just on a positive note. :-) 
Thanks again for your replies and ideas, this is really appreciated. 

 

@nikidebruyn hey Niki, thought I link you here to the community topic to keep this topic rolling :-) 

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