Internal working example · not for circulation

Pre-Issue Control Sheet

East Africa property · May 2026

One page per property, per month, completed corporate-side before the pack is released to its owner. Today that last check is one named person at each site, a different role each time, and it leaves no trace. This writes it down.

Pack: monthly BRM pack, issued to its owner June 2026
Last modified: 9 June 2026, 12:55 UTC
Shape: 29 slides · 2 native charts · 8 native tables · 24 embedded images
Sheet: v03 · check register v0.9 · dry run, 25 July 2026

Prepared by DH analyst · date

Reviewed by second person, never the preparer · date

Released by Aleph corporate · date

Run retrospectively, on a pack already issued. Nothing here was actioned or could have been. The sheet shows what the control would have caught before the pack left the building.

Evidence basis

L Tied to source

P Internally consistent only

U Unverifiable, reason named

No trial balance has been obtained for May, so no financial figure in this pack has been tied to a ledger. The single source-verified finding below is file metadata, read directly from the file. Everything else tests the pack against itself, and where a figure exists only inside an image it cannot be tested at all, which is recorded, not assumed sound. This sheet does not say the numbers are right. It says whether the pack agrees with itself, and names what it could not reach.

Internal working example · property anonymised · not for circulation

Findings

Each finding carries a permanent id from a fixed register of 30 checks, 25 of them live this cycle, so results compare month to month and property to property.

ID	Check	Where	Finding	Evidence	Severity	Action
01	MT-05	s2-s3, s11	The pack devotes a slide to the cash flow forecast and a stated funding shortfall. Cash is not mentioned at the front of the pack at all: the highlights commentary opens on total revenue, then GOP margin, then flow-through, and nothing at the front points forward to that slide.	P	1 ESCALATE	Do not issue yet
02	CL-01	s3	The summary reads "Positive Flow-Thru with achieving 77.4%. Also, a significant 75.3% growth over last year." Two percentages sit in one sentence, one labelled flow-through and one labelled growth. Neither figure appears anywhere else in the pack, so neither can be matched to a source and the sheet cannot confirm which measure 75.3 is. Which measure is 75.3, and against what base?	U	3 ASK	Confirm before send
03	CL-03	s9, s14	Commissions above budget are attributed to volume: "Room commissions are above budget due to strong occupancy and revenue performance, mainly driven by OTA." The pack's own channel commentary puts OTA at 18 per cent of room revenue against 82 per cent direct. A commission overspend driven by an 18 per cent base implies a rate or blend movement the pack does not describe. Does commission cost move in proportion to OTA production, or has the commission rate changed?	P	3 ASK	Question to corporate
04	MT-04	s11	The cash commentary states a shortfall and cites a named bank facility of a stated amount, which is of a different order to the monthly debt service carried in the cash table. Is the stated figure the facility, the drawdown or the monthly instalment, and which currency governs?	U	3 ASK	Question to corporate
05	MT-04	s11	A payment in the cash table appears out of line with the surrounding months and carries no commentary. The figure is inside an image and no materiality threshold has been agreed, so this is recorded as a question, not a variance. One-off, or accrual phasing that should have been flagged earlier?	U	3 ASK	Question to corporate
06	IN-04	pack	2 native charts and 8 native tables against 24 embedded images. The pack uses native tables for payroll, learning and development and capex, so the capability is present. No financial exhibit uses one: the P&L, the cash flow forecast, the segment table and the channel mix are all pictures, which cannot be tied, reused or corrected without retyping them. This is the constraint behind two of the findings above.	P	4 NOTE	Estate-wide, not property
07	ST-05	file	File metadata: the created stamp reads 2020-03-06T15:03:22Z, shared to the second by all four property packs held, across four countries, and by the regional pack. The template field names an Aleph corporate deck from 2019. The creator field reads SOUTHERN AFRICA LEADERSHIP on this pack and on the regional pack, and FINANCIAL CONTROLLER on the other three. Metadata in this estate is inherited, so it carries no property-level signal.	L	4 NOTE	Log template lineage

Checks run

Not-runnable is shown separately from passed, always. A check that could not run is never counted as a pass.

AR arithmetic

6 of 6 reconciled

RevPAR reconciles to ADR by occupancy; room revenue ties to the segment table; direct share recomputes; GOP agrees between headline and P&L within rounding. Read from the image layer where legible, so nothing is tied to a source and none of it is reproducible without the same manual read

CL claim vs number

3 of 5 passed

CL-01 and CL-03 raised above. No metric renamed between slides; direction words match sign elsewhere

MT materiality

0 of 5 passed

3 not runnable, 2 raised

MT-04 and MT-05 raised above. MT-01 and MT-03 not runnable: no readable variance data to rank. MT-02 not runnable: no materiality threshold agreed

ST staleness

2 of 5 passed

2 not runnable, 1 raised

ST-01 and ST-04 pass: cover month, headers and dates correct for May. ST-05 raised above. ST-02 and ST-03 not runnable, see limits

IN integrity

3 of 4 passed

IN-04 raised above. No broken chart objects, no junk rows, no blank totals found in the readable layer

SD standard

not run

Cycle two

Not checked this month, and why

Nothing has been tied to a ledger. No trial balance has been obtained, so no financial figure here is verified against a source system. This is the largest limit on the sheet, and a trial balance removes it.
Figures inside images were not tested. 24 of the pack's 34 figure objects are pictures, and every financial exhibit in this pack is a picture. Findings 04 and 05 are unverifiable for exactly this reason. Finding 02 is unverifiable because neither figure it quotes appears anywhere else in the pack.
No prior-month comparison. April's pack was not held at run time, so ST-02 (repeated action lines), ST-03 (chart series labels) and the ST-05 revision delta could not run. All three become available from the next cycle.
No materiality threshold. MT-02 cannot return a result until one number is agreed with Aleph. It is the only input this sheet needs.
Aleph standards not applied. The SD class arrives in cycle two.
The regional consolidation was not examined. Out of scope for a property sheet.
This is not an audit of the property, the finance team or any individual, and no finding above names a person.

Overrides

None recorded. Where a finding is accepted and the pack issues anyway, it is logged here with the name of the person who accepted it and the reason. A waived finding with a named waiver is a working control; a waived finding with no trace is not.

Carried to next month

Open items sit with the corporate reviewer. Nothing on this sheet has been sent to a property.

ID	Item	Owner	Due
03	Commission cost reconciled to channel production and rate cards	Aleph corporate	With June pack
04	Facility, currency and instalment confirmed	Aleph corporate	With June pack
05	Payment explained as one-off or phasing	Aleph corporate	With June pack
07	Template lineage logged in the breakage register	DH	w/c 27 July

Notes and abbreviations

Every code used above, expanded. This block appears on every control sheet.

Evidence class

L, tied to source.: Checked against something we hold independently of the pack's own narrative: a trial balance, a ledger export, a property management system export, or the file's own metadata.
P, internally consistent only.: Checked against the pack itself. It means the pack does not contradict itself on this point. It does not mean the figure is right.
U, unverifiable.: Could not be tested, with the reason named on the finding: no trial balance, the figure sits inside an image rather than as data, no prior pack, or no budget file.

Severity and action

1 ESCALATE.: Material and owner-visible. Do not issue until resolved.
2 CORRECT.: Wrong, but not material to the owner's decision. Fix before send.
3 ASK.: May well be correct; only the property can settle it. Recorded as a question, with the answer logged.
4 NOTE.: Hygiene or an estate-wide observation. Tracked, no action this cycle.

Check classes

AR, arithmetic.: Does the pack add up, and does the same metric carry the same value throughout.
CL, claim versus number.: Does the written commentary match the figures behind it.
MT, materiality and omission.: Is the biggest thing in the pack the thing the pack leads with, and is anything material unexplained.
ST, staleness and copy-forward.: Is this month's pack carrying last month's content.
IN, presentation integrity.: Broken objects, junk rows, blank totals, and whether figures are readable as data or only as pictures.
SD, Aleph standard.: The pack against Aleph's own published thresholds. Arrives in cycle two.

The number after the class is the individual check within it, fixed for good, so the same id means the same test every month and at every property.

Checks cited above

CL-01.: Every quantified claim in the commentary matches a figure in the pack.
CL-03.: Attributions are consistent with the pack's own supporting data.
MT-01.: The headline names the largest money variance.
MT-02.: Every variance above the materiality threshold carries commentary.
MT-03.: The largest single movement appears in the narrative at all.
MT-04.: Cash, funding and fee items are addressed where abnormal.
MT-05.: Any figure that changes the owner's decision is in the first two slides.
ST-01.: Cover month, title dates and footers match the reporting month.
ST-02.: No action or commentary line is textually identical to last month's.
ST-03.: Chart series labels match the periods actually shown.
ST-04.: Section headers name the current month.
ST-05.: File metadata sanity, including lineage and the revision delta against the prior pack.
IN-04.: Figure legibility: native charts and tables against embedded images.

Terms used above

BRM.: Business Review Meeting, the monthly pack and review an operator gives a hotel's owner.
P&L.: Profit and loss statement.
GOP.: Gross operating profit, before ownership costs such as rent, interest and depreciation.
Flow-through.: How much of each extra pound of revenue reaches profit.
ADR.: Average daily rate, the average room rate achieved.
RevPAR.: Revenue per available room, rate multiplied by occupancy.
OTA.: Online travel agent, such as Booking.com or Expedia, which charges a commission.
Capex.: Capital expenditure.
Trial balance.: The listing of every ledger account and its balance. It is what a figure must be tied to before this sheet will call it verified.
s3, s11.: Slide 3, slide 11, and so on, in the pack under review.
UTC.: Coordinated Universal Time, used so timestamps compare across countries.
DH.: Deep Hospitality.