One of the duties of a person that is a front desk clerk at the hotel I work at is balancing credit cards. Now to me that is a pretty cut and dry thing. You use the fundamental skills you learned in grade school. You know adding and subtracting? So either people there can’t add and subtract or the training at the place is fucking horrendous. Take a look below and let see if you can figure out this task that apparently is to hard for some people. Example A is the credit card receipt totals that the front desk clerk added up. Example B is the totals for the credit cards off of the computer report.

Example A
room 101 25.00
room 102 50.00
room 103 25.00
room 104 25.00
room 104 25.00
total: 150.00
over: 50.00

Example B
room 101 25.00
room 102 25.00
room 103 25.00
room 104 25.00
total: 100.00

Now the way it is supposed to work is that if the total you get from adding the credit cards receipts up don’t balance you run the report to see why the amount is out of whack. Simple right? Again it seems it’s not that simple.

So in Example A it should be clear to anyone that there is something wrong. The front desk clerk knows that the total should be 100 bucks. I know this because they wrote on the adding machine tape that they were over 50 bucks. Now in the old days a front desk clerk was trained properly this didn’t happen. But that was then and this is now.

Back then we were smart enough to print out the computer report and compare the two. You take the computer report (Example B) and your credit cards receipts (Example A) and figure out why you are over. Granted this can be a pain in the ass. When you got over a hundred credit cards to go through it is a major pain in the ass. But it’s got to be done.

So lets look at our computer report (Example B) and see why the credit cards (Example A) are off. You just go down the list. First off you can see that for whatever reason the credit card for room 102 is different on the credit card report. So you take a look and you will find that the guest was overcharged and a adjustment was made. The old credit card slip wasn’t taken out and a new one put in. That is the hard one. Now we look at the list again. Pretty simple here. For whatever reason room 104 has a duplicate receipt in the pile and no one tried to balance at all.

So by checking the computer totals to see why the credit card receipts are off you can easily balance up the credit cards. This is just one of the things that irks me to no end. Now the last front desk manager fumbled the ball here. I only hope the next one we get can start to do things right.