Whenever staying at a hotel, you rarely need your wallet. Any purchases made are “billed to your room.” Then on the final morning of your stay before checkout, you receive a nice sheet of paper under the door listing all of your purchases. What makes this experience so simple? It all comes down to hotel folios.
While the process is effortless for guests, it’s more complicated for the hotels. Before hotels can use the information contained in the folio, they need to extract it. But manual hotel folio data extraction is a slow process that often results in errors.
To maximize speed and minimize errors, Veryfi’s intelligent document processing solution combines optical character recognition (OCR) with artificial intelligence. Veryfi’s AI-driven solution provides highly accurate hotel folio data extraction in seconds. With no humans in the data transformation loop, employees can spend more time focused on customer service and experience. Software companies can also white-label Veryfi to enhance their expense management applications with advanced features and improve their customer experience.
What Is a Hotel Folio?
When guests check into a hotel, the hotel opens a file that tracks their account activities during their stay. This internal document is called a folio. The folio records the guest’s purchases and payments until the guest checks out and the account is closed. The folio then serves as the basis for the invoice.
Types of folios that hotels maintain include:
- A guest folio—an account of a single guest or a single room that adds all charges from the different points of sales (e.g., dining, gym, gift shop, rentals) and subtracts all payments made by the guest
- The master folio—a summary of subfolios generated for a group of guests under a main account (e.g., all guests staying in a hotel for a corporate event or a wedding)
- A non-guest folio—similar to the guest folio but for someone who is enjoying hotel services without renting a room (e.g., dining, spa, rentals, bar tab)
- An employee folio—an account for hotel services an employee enjoyed (e.g., complimentary meals, discounted services)
Who Needs a Hotel Folio and Why?
Hotels need the folio to track each guest’s purchased services in order to produce an invoice. Guests can also use the hotel folio to view their own purchases and the associated costs of their stay.
Each night, the hotel audits the folios. The audit consists of reviewing, reconciling, and booking (entering information into the accounting ledger) the previous day’s transactions. If a guest’s balance exceeds the individual’s allowed credit, the night audit will alert hotel staff, who may request a new credit authorization, increased deposit or a partial payment from the guest.
Reconciliation matches the guest folios (usually for people who have checked out of the hotel) and the payments received. This process includes:
- Capturing all of the guests’ payments.
- Reconciling the number of occupied rooms and closed folios.
- Verifying room rates.
- Identifying no-show bookings.
What Information Is Included in the Hotel Folio?
The folio contains information required for the hotel’s accounting system. When a guest requests a service, every charge is posted. For example, if a guest orders room service, the folio will track the date, time and the menu items ordered.
Similarly, if the hotel offers spa services, the folio will track a guest’s appointment time, duration, the type of spa service and the identity of the person who provided the service (e.g., the massage therapist), etc.
When a guest pays for these services, the folio’s balance is updated. Finally, when that guest checks out, all charges and payments are calculated so the guest receives the remaining balance.
Why Use Veryfi’s AI-Driven Solution for Hotel Folio Data Extraction?
Veryfi’s is ready to go on day 1 with little or no required set-up or integration. Hotels can immediately start processing folios quickly and accurately. Veryfi’s API-based solution takes unstructured data that humans understand and transforms it into the structured data that computers need to perform business intelligence analysis. With support for multiple credit card emitters (not just large banks), multiple currencies and tax codes, Veryfi makes it a breeze to serve clients from across the globe.
Furthermore, hotel employees assigned to folio data extraction can now spend less time working on tedious manual data entry into the financial reporting tool and more time addressing customer experience. Night audits will be faster and more accurate, with fewer mistakes to identify and correct, saving time and money. All of the above contribute to an improved customer experience, higher retention and greater customer loyalty.
| Significantly increase hotel folio data extraction accuracy | Maintain high security and data privacy compliance | Receive unparalleled quality and customer support |
| Veryfi’s 100% AI-driven data transformation solution eliminates the need for tedious manual data entry. Process hotel folios in seconds, with unparalleled accuracy. | Veryfi is software, with no humans in the loop. Veryfi is compliant with GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA, and is SOC2 Type 2 security certified. | Capterra, a Gartner company, selected Veryfi as the leader in its Best Expense Report Software Shortlist. Veryfi received the highest user review score (4.9/5) and the only perfect Ratings Score (50/50) of any product in the expense reporting category. |
Immediately start processing folios, in volume, with speed and accuracy. Learn how you can benefit from Veryfi’s AI-driven hotel folio data extraction? Sign up for a free trial.
