What happens after your event ends: the reconciliation nobody sees

The event ends, the attendees fly home, and most planners disappear. This is when I do some of my most important work.

The room block reconciliation

I reconcile the room block against the contract, line by line, before the hotel sends the final invoice. Hotels make mistakes. I check for double-charged room nights, missing concessions, and attrition calculated on the wrong dates, because every correction is money back to my client.

This is slow, unglamorous work, and it is worth real money. A room night charged twice is a few hundred dollars. Attrition calculated on the wrong dates can be thousands. I go through the folio the way I go through the contract, because the hotel's accounting department is not checking my client's interests. That is my job.

The banquet checks

I review the banquet checks against the event orders. If we were charged for 70 dinners and 65 attended, I want to know why, and I want the credit.

The guarantee is a number we gave the hotel in advance. The actual is the number of people who ate. When those two numbers differ, the difference is money, and I chase it. Catering managers expect this from good planners. It is part of the professional rhythm.

A debrief, not a survey

I send you a debrief. What worked, what I would change, what we learned about your group that makes the next event better. Your next event starts the day this one ends.

The debrief is where the relationship compounds. Every event teaches me something about your people: how they travel, what they need, where the friction was. I write it down so the next event starts smarter than this one did.

Then I go quiet for a bit, because I am tired too. Planning looks effortless from the outside. It is not. But the invoice is clean, the attendees are happy, and nobody had to think about logistics for the whole event.

That is the whole business. I will do it again whenever you are ready.