If 2025 taught the industry anything, it’s that tighter margins and fragmented technology created a strong desire for consolidation and unification. To get the advantage for 2026, hotels need processes to help them get real-time data visibility and to cut out the repetitive work slowing teams down.
The first step to a smarter, more efficient back office is eliminating the friction that keeps your accounting team from performing at a higher level. These six manual processes are holding hotels back from big operational gains (and they’re ones that typically get overlooked).
1. Relying on Manual Banking Processes
Ask any hotel accountant how their day starts, and the answer usually sounds the same: log in to multiple bank accounts, confirm balances across properties, pull transaction files, and get everything ready for reconciliation (even if they aren’t drafting it until the end of the month). It’s repetitive, manual, and pulls time away from the work that actually improves financial performance.
What should be a simple check on cash flow turns into a scavenger hunt across systems and spreadsheets. Automation changes that.
With tools like HIA’s BankConnect, this entire routine shrinks from hours to minutes. Since all of your banking information lives in a unified portal, accountants get immediate, portfolio-wide cash visibility with their morning coffee.
And reconciliation? It becomes more of an easy walk instead of a grueling marathon to get it finished before month’s end. All your transactions are automatically imported into the system and smart-matched against the GL to streamline reconciliation.
“Bank reconciliation process is much easier. Huge time savings to have the system already match transactions. We’ve been able to reduce the time spent on bank reconciliations by 50%. We now close our monthly books even faster than we ever thought possible.”
– HIA User, Chief Financial Officer, Lexington, KY
With automation in place, your team isn’t flying blind on cash balances—they’re getting clarity across their entire portfolio.
2. Sending Recurring Reports Manually
If reporting is still a manual task, it’s a bottleneck waiting to happen. It doesn’t matter if it’s the daily report, cash balance report, or the P&L; the steps and risks for sending them out manually never change.
If the person responsible for them is unavailable, everything slows down. Reports go out late. People get left off distribution lists. Wrong versions get circulated. Before long, half the portfolio is chasing spreadsheets instead of reviewing results.
And it’s entirely avoidable. With automated scheduling, like HIA’s Report Scheduler, reporting becomes something you set and forget. Your reports go out automatically at the same time, to the same recipients, every day.
“Hotel Investor Apps has been an absolute game-changer for our hotel operations. After years of juggling multiple systems, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds, adopting HIA brought a level of clarity and control that I didn’t realize we were missing. The biggest difference has been in the automation and accuracy. Tasks that once took hours—pulling financial reports, managing budgets, organizing CAPEX projects, and reconciling data across departments—are now consolidated, consistent, and fast.”
– HIA User, General Manager, Jackson, MS
When reporting runs itself, your team can finally focus on the numbers, not the inbox.
3. Building Intercompany Entries One Transaction at a Time
Most accounting teams don’t notice how much time they lose to intercompany activity until they step back and look at it. Every “due to” or “due from” requires a matching entry somewhere else. One small typo becomes an imbalance across the books. One missed entry becomes a day spent reconciling.
This isn’t just inefficient; it works against every consolidation and unification effort hotels have been pushing toward. And it’s yet another task that can be handled with automation.
Transactions can be split across any number of hotels, and the system automatically generates every due-to and due-from entry needed. It can also centralize vendor and customer records, streamlines AR/AP between companies, and keeps your books in sync. Just one entry and one click.
“One of the things I personally like as well is how they can set up intercompany entries. It is so convenient to record intercompany entries without going to each company’s records. It is really good for a company not only in the hotel industry, but works fine on diverse businesses as well.”
– HIA User, Corporate Accountant, Niagara Falls, Canada
4. Operating Without Real-Time Dashboards
Modern hotels demand modern speed, but many teams are still running on yesterday’s process. 2026 will not be the year to keep stitching together spreadsheets or waiting for someone to send you a PDF. It will be the year to give your teams (and owners) instant visibility into operations without waiting for the daily or end-of-month report.
That’s the gap dashboards fill. They let everyone on your teams tap into live financial and operational data anytime, anywhere. And HIA takes that even further.
As the first true purpose-built hospitality ERP and accounting solution, HIA delivers dashboards built for how hotels actually operate. Every role (CFO, controller, GM, AP, and even ownership) can get real-time, advanced dashboards tailored to what they need to see without being overwhelmed by additional data. Plus, users can drill down into any transaction with a single click. It’s clarity without the wait, and speed without the manual work.
“We’ve been using Hotel Investor Apps (HIA) across our hotel portfolio for a while now, and it has truly become one of the most valuable tools in our back-office operations. From accounting and reporting to automation and integrations, HIA ties everything together in one centralized platform. One of my favorite aspects is how well the dashboards are designed. Each role — from property-level accounting to ownership — gets the right level of access and information. It’s straightforward, visual, and helps identify trends quickly.”
– HIA User, Project and Asset Manager, Savannah, GA
5. Typing, Scanning, and Coding AP Invoices by Hand
Typing and scanning invoices has been part of hotel accounting for years, but that doesn’t mean it should be part of your future. Instead of keying in line items or sorting invoices property by property, the fastest-growing hotel groups are moving towards modern solutions to capture the information automatically, code it intelligently, and route it through approval workflows.
HIA takes this a step further by aligning automation with the realities of hotel operations: multi-property splits, portfolio-wide AP oversight, transparent approval chains, and expenses that post to the system immediately. It also taps into powerful advanced optical character recognition (OCR) that can extract invoice data in under 30 seconds, even remembering GL codes based on prior entries.
“Here’s what I love most: Saves me time: No more scrambling for invoices! The app keeps everything organized, so I can track down any vendor or bill in seconds. Effortless organization: It automatically stores copies of all invoices, eliminating the need for physical folders or messy filing cabinets.”
– HIA User, General Manager, Westlake Village, CA
6. Getting By Without Mobile Access (Especially for Approvals & Owners)
Hotel accounting no longer just happens at a desk. Approvers travel. Owners move between properties. GMs live in their buildings, not their inboxes. Yet email threads and desktop logins are still the default to keep approvals moving.
While this worked for a long time, the expectation for access on the go has become impossible to ignore. Teams and owners are now expecting the ability to review, approve, and stay informed wherever they are.
That’s exactly what HIA offers. Everyone involved in running the portfolio gets the full functionality of desktop accounting straight to their device (even owners can stay in sync with ‘view-only’ access). Reviewing financials, clearing approvals, updating budgets, and staying on top of performance can all happen on the go. And because everything syncs in real time, the information is always current.
“My ops team loves the mobile application and uses it on a daily basis. Reviewing performance is easier than ever, and all at our fingertips. We have a four-level approval process that sends push notifications out to the approver via the mobile application. They can review the details, look at the invoice, and then approve or deny with notes sent back to the requester.”
– Prakash Maggan, CFO, Rainmaker Hospitality
Read more about how mobile access changed the game for Rainmaker Hospitality.
Broader Impact: What Automating These Six Workflows Really Changes
Individually, each automation removes a little friction. When you put them all together, you free up your talent to do the work you hired them for, not admin disguised as accounting work. They can:
- Spot trends before they hit your P&L
- Forecast issues weeks earlier
- Identify cost creep
- Provide insights that actually shape performance, instead of spending all day documenting it
To learn more about building a financial foundation that can carry your hotel into the future, schedule a demo.
Want proof? Check out 200+ reviews from hotel teams who’ve already made the shift to more automated accounting with HIA.
Jaime Goss has over a decade of marketing experience in the hospitality industry. At Hotel Investor Apps, Jaime heads up marketing initiatives including brand strategy, website design, content, email marketing, advertising and press relations.
