PT the Auditor
Black Helicopters, Intestinal Fortitude, Car Copulation and a PARCS Trifecta
For more than 15 years now, my Master and I have writ- ten article after article about audit and operational
issues. Usually, the articles are critical of the operators or own- ers and their efforts to control their PARCS and the revenues reported by them. Finally, in Parking Today Volume 16, No. 10, Page 32 (for
those who missed the October 2011 article), an operator stood up and announced that they have a tolerance factor of 0.5% for uncollected tickets for any 24/7 location. This took some guts to publicly state what most operators neglect to mention to their clients every single day! This is great! At last someone recognizes that uncollected
tickets are a major issue, one needing to be addressed. Can that tolerance factor be even lower with a little work and effort? If so, what amount of bottom-line dollars does that bring to the own- ers, andmaybe the operators if they have an incentive fee? Letme offer some short stories fromreal-life audits, and then
you judge for yourself and set a level of tolerance for your opera- tor tomeet or exceed. The first is a shocker! Alarge hotel has valet parking with a
$30 rate after 1 hour and 41 minutes ($5 every 20 minutes). The hotel does a large number of functions, events and banquets. If you stand at a distance during a break, you will see patrons with
$10 bills in their hands (and claim stub) along the rail. The valets pull those vehicles and off the owners go. So what’s shocking about that youmay ask? The facility had
a 7.5% uncollected ticket factor. The operator claimed that the uncollected ticketswere all “roomguests” paid through the room folio and that 7.5% wasn’t so bad. He had another hotel valet operation where the uncollected tickets were about 11%, he said. (I always thought that any uncollected ticket in a valet operation was called a stolen carwith attached police report.) MyMaster and I happened to be looking at a busy facility a
few months ago. The average ticket price was $35.50, with a $40 all-day rate. During the 62-day window of July and August, the garage issued 59,789 tickets and collected or accounted for 56,548 tickets. That left 3,241 tickets unaccounted, or 5.4% of the issued
tickets.At the average price of $35.50, the annualized value of the uncollected tickets was $690,333. That’s a lot of Milk-Bone bis- cuits tome… In contrast, the same city, the same equipment, the same time
window – but different operator. Tickets issued were 54,455 and collected were 54,385, a loss of 70 tickets over 62 days. The loss factorwas 0.13%. Must be those big black helicopters that snatch cars fromthe
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Parking Today
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