Plug the Revenue Leaks: Tightening Park Operations

No matter how well intentioned, park owners often fail to close the loopholes that lead to lost revenue. The familiarity and family atmosphere often prevent these owners from running their parks like a well oiled machine.

In our experience here is the list of place where we clamp down and help our owners spot lost revenue:

• Laundry-Make sure whoever empties the laundry machines is someone who is trustworthy, records the revenue immediately, and makes the deposit the same day. Ideally, it would be a two part system where one employee empties the machine while another looks on while the quarters are weighed and recorded. Better yet, move to credit card or blue tooth enabled machines that bypass cash altogether and the money land directly in your bank account.

Vending Machines-the same holds true with coin operated vending. Make sure there is accountability with the way the money and supplies are handled. It is very easy to find sodas, snacks, or money missing when you do your own on site vending.

Propane-Propane is invisible and can easily slip through the cracks. Make sure you keep a propane pumping log at the pump, there is a clear process for pumping and payment, and no guest is allowed to get tanks filled without prepayment or being escorted to the payment register for payment.

Credits and Refunds-at AOS, we watch credits and refunds like a hawk. When we reconcile night audit reports, credits and or refunds are an automatic red flag. We look at the bookings associated with the credit or refund and we make sure there are legitimate reasons whey these occurred.

Storage-It is very easy to have RV’s, boat trailers, and the like in your storage unit and not even know they are there. We ask our parks to run a storage audit once a month-listing the number of units in the storage lot, the make, model, tag number and then compare it against guests who are being charged for storage.

Extra Charges and Fees-for a park that charges for extra people, vehicles, and pets, this can be a gold mine. At one of my parks, we swept the park twice a day looking for these offenders. If a site registered (2) guests, but there were (6)chairs around the fire ring-chances are-we had missing revenue. At a busy park with hundreds of sites, a sweep through the park looking for unregistered guests, vehicles or pets can net several hundred dollars.

These are just a few ways to tighten your belt, close the loopholes, and gain some much needed revenue.