The fastest way to kill a new hospitality revenue dashboard is to let front office, reservations, and ownership each believe a different occupancy number. In our commissions, the glossary comes before the charts.
Three definitions that always need ink
Complimentary nights — Are they in occupancy? In ADR? Both? Neither? Write the rule and stick to it across every panel.
House use — Rooms held for operations should not silently inflate or deflate RevPAR. Name them and decide whether they appear in a separate strip.
Day-use — Especially relevant for airport-adjacent and business hotels in Hong Kong. Decide whether day-use counts toward occupied rooms for the calendar night.
Reconcile a sample week by hand
Before handover, we pick five nights and walk from night audit PDF to dashboard totals with the property’s own staff. Disagreements get resolved in the glossary, not with a “close enough” shrug.
Keep the glossary short
One page is enough. If the document becomes a novel, nobody will open it during a heated ownership call. Link each dashboard label to a single sentence definition and the source export field.
A dashboard that matches the night audit earns the right to be trusted on booking pace and channel mix. Skip the glossary and you will rebuild the politics you hoped to escape.