Picture this: You’re a successful hotel group celebrating the acquisition of its 5th property, when suddenly your team realizes you can’t close your books within 15 days. Why? Your accounting system wasn’t built for consolidation of this many properties. Now you find yourself proverbially up a creek without a paddle—and have nothing but your software to blame.
In order to keep growing and adding properties to your company’s portfolio while still having a big picture of your financials, a good multi-property accounting software is essential.
What, then, are some signs that your company needs a new way to handle your hotel portfolio accounting? Below are five that mean you might need to invest in software that specializes in hotel accounting for multiple properties.
5 Signs Your Hotel Group Has Outgrown Its Accounting System
#1: Too Many Spreadsheets, Too Little Time
If your finance team is relying on spreadsheets to consolidate data your accounting system should handle natively, it might be time for a change.
Symptoms like month-end close taking longer each cycle, and having to manually rekey data between your PMS, POS, and accounting software because they don’t integrate, are signs that your system isn’t working efficiently for your portfolio size.
#2: You Have No Way to See Your Financials Across Properties
If you’re having to track things like inter-company transactions outside of your accounting system, it means you can’t see your financials across properties; AKA, you have no visibility when it comes to your entire hotel portfolio. In this scenario, each property is running its own “shadow” process because your core system is not able to standardize reporting across locations.
Having a clear bird’s-eye view of your finances is one of the most important parts of hotel accounting for multiple properties. Ensuring you have a multi-property accounting software that can handle dozens of locations is of the utmost importance.
#3: Your Reporting Capabilities are Limited
Does your audit prep look like a multi-week fire drill because your reporting capabilities fall short of your needs? If so, you might need to switch to a multi-property hotel accounting software.
Additional signs of reporting capability breakdown include your system being unable to produce USALI-compliant reports natively or reports without heavy manual manipulation. If your departmental/schedule-level reporting requires manual splitting, or if you have no real drill-down from summary P&L to transaction-level detail, you also might need to consider changing your hotel portfolio accounting software.
#4: Low or No Integration Capabilities
If your current accounting software has little to no API or integration capability with newer PMS, procurement, or BI tools, your system is at a bottleneck and won’t be able to handle the amount of properties your company’s portfolio has grown to hold. To counteract this, your team should start looking into multi-property hotel accounting software.
#5: Little to No Real-Time Financial Visibility
Has your financial team been struggling to produce necessary financial data? If your system is unable to produce cuts of data that leadership is asking for, it’s time to invest in a system that can. Leadership needs to be able to make decisions based on real-time financial data—it’s nothing short of crucial to making the right financial moves for your company.
When Should a Hotel Group Switch from Single-Property to Multi-Property Accounting Software?
The general rule of thumb is that if an accounting system was built or configured for a single property or just a handful of properties, and your company has since expanded its portfolio to 5 or more properties, the consolidation and multi-entity capabilities are the first features to break. If any of the pain points above resonated with you, it’s time to consider making the switch from a single-property to a multi-property accounting software.
PICTURE: a team shaking hands with another team, signing a contract for new software! yay!
Multi-Property Hotel Accounting Software, Purpose-Built for Hospitality
Portfolio growth for a hotelier is fantastic. When a tipping point is reached, however, and your software is no longer working for you, it’s time for a change that supports the growth your company is undergoing.
Multi-property hotel accounting software that’s purpose-built for hospitality from day one is designed specifically for portfolios that are growing, offering capabilities and integrations that make adding properties easy.
Some software vendors, such as M3, offer both multi-property accounting software and accounting services for companies that would rather outsource the complexity of multi-property hotel financial management entirely.
Interested in seeing what that would look like for your portfolio? Reach out to us today to start a conversation.
FAQs
What are the biggest accounting challenges for multi-property hotel groups?
The biggest challenges are finding a system that supports the addition of other properties to a portfolio. Lots of software solutions will work fine for a few properties, but start to break when a company acquires more and more properties, making the gaps harder and harder to fill.
How does multi-property accounting software improve financial consolidation?
In short, multi-property accounting software improves financial consolidation by standardizing COA, automating roll-ups, handling inter-company transactions, and producing USALI-standardized reports.
