USALI and Hotel Financials
Welcome to Hotel Numbers Made Simple, your weekly video designed to help you build your hotel numbers team, make your financials more helpful, and ultimately save you money!
Your simple tip of the week is to use financial statements that follow hotel industry standards – the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry.
If you’re coming from another industry, and looking at a hotel income statement, I’m not gonna lie, it may look a little quirky.
The income and expense accounts may look all jumbled up and messy. It may seem odd that there are several different accounts with the same name.
That is all true! But there is a good reason for that! Accounts are organized by department. So all the rooms income and expenses come first, then all the F&B income and expenses, and so on throughout all your departments.
This allows you to run reports for each department independently. The level of detail of the accounts also helps you make operational decisions for the hotel.
For instance seeing all the room revenue broken out by market segment helps you make pricing and marketing decisions. The payroll broken out into specific detail helps you make staffing decisions.
Also, following industry standards will help you onboard new team members. If they’ve been in the industry, they may just need to learn your hotels specific numbering system rather than learning the entire structure from scratch.
If you are trying to benchmark your hotels against the competition, you will only be able to do that if you follow industry standards.
And if you are trying to sell or refinance your hotel, many brokers and lenders will only consider you if you follow industry standards.
So your simple tip for the week is if you aren’t already, consider switching to standardized hotel financials following the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging industry.
