Imagine you’re a corporate controller who manages over 50 hotel properties spread across multiple regions. Before you can make a single decision about payments, funding, or cash movement, you need to know your balances, so every morning starts the same way.
You, or a subordinate, log into bank portals, one after another after another. You wait for the multi-factor authentication codes to be sent, verify your identity, pull the balances, and download transactions. Then, you’ve got to copy all that information into the master spreadsheets you’ve got.
You might have started this process with coffee, but by the time you’ve finally got your complete picture, it’s well past lunchtime. The proactive decisions you needed to make early in the day have turned into reactive ones. And tomorrow morning, you get to run the same drills all over again.
For many hotel finance teams managing nationwide portfolios, this isn’t a hypothetical; it’s a daily reality. And it’s silently killing their efficiency.
That’s why more finance teams are rethinking their cash management workflows and looking at tools like HIA’s BankConnect that allow them to unify cash access and gain real-time visibility across their portfolios.
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When Fragmentation Becomes a Problem
As hotel portfolios grow, it’s natural for them to acquire new accounts, banks, and financial relationships. Local banks might offer special deals, owners often have preferred lenders, and each property will end up having several accounts (e.g., payroll, operating cash, reserves, credit cards).
But when you get to the point where:
- Teams lose days every month manually reconciling
- Cash visibility lags by hours or days
- Basic questions require juggling multiple spreadsheets and manual rollups
- Month-end closes start eating up more time
- Leadership is forced to operate on stale numbers
…then you’re no longer managing cash, it’s managing you. Payments get delayed. Transfers happen reactively. Opportunities to rebalance cash across the portfolio are missed entirely.
When bank data lives outside your accounting and reporting systems, finance teams are forced to act as the integration layer. They have to manually assemble a picture that should already exist in a single location. But when balances flow directly into your financial platform, already structured, organized, and ready to use, everything gets easier (and faster).
What Unified Cash Access Actually Looks Like at Scale
Unified cash access means being able to open one system and see where cash stands across the entire portfolio (by property, by region, or in total) without logging into dozens of bank portals or stitching together spreadsheets first.
And it scales cleanly. As new properties come online or financial relationships change, the process doesn’t break. Finance teams don’t absorb more manual work just to keep up. Visibility improves without adding complexity.
That’s what HIA’s BankConnect makes possible. It gives teams access to a single dashboard that streams live bank balances and transactions in the same financial platform they already use for accounting and reporting.
From there, the benefits show up quickly. Here’s what it looks like:
Time Back in Your Day
The most immediate result teams will see is reclaimed time that doesn’t just make their mornings easier; it changes how their entire day flows.
With HIA’s BankConnect in place, finance teams can actually get their cash position with their morning coffee. Multiple bank portals and repeated authentication steps are replaced with a single, secure dashboard.
That shift alone removes hours of repetitive work. Cash reviews that used to take most of the morning now happen in minutes, allowing teams to move directly into decision-making. Payments, transfers, and funding decisions can be handled early in the day when they can make the most impact. The result isn’t just faster work, it’s a finance team operating on its own timeline, not the system’s.
Cleaner Data That Keeps Operations Moving
Every spreadsheet update, file upload, and copy-paste step creates an opportunity for errors: duplicate postings, missed transactions, or balances that don’t quite line up across systems. That means every number comes with a question mark.
- Is this updated?
- Did something clear overnight?
- Is this the final balance or yesterday’s snapshot?
With BankConnect, bank balances and transactions flow directly into the general ledger, already structured and mapped to the correct accounts. There’s no re-keying, no file handling, and no need to translate financial data into accounting data by hand. The numbers finance teams see are the numbers they can trust.
Reconciliation Without the Month-End Scramble
Close is supposed to be a checkpoint. A moment to confirm where things stand and move forward. But for many teams, closing the books has stopped being a controlled step and has become a dreaded cleanup process that’s consuming far too much of their time.
Unified cash access helps reverse that trend. Instead of reconciling in bursts (or cramming it in at the end of the month/quarter), it happens continuously as transactions come in. When something doesn’t match, SmartMatching technology flags it early, so teams resolve it before it’s relied on for reporting, payments, or decision-making.
It restores close to what it should be: a controlled, predictable process. One that can realistically support faster close targets like the three-day close many finance teams aim for.
Security You Don’t Have to Second-Guess
Any time finance teams talk about centralizing bank access, the same concern comes up: security. Visibility can’t come at the cost of control. Finance teams need the ability to see balances across the portfolio without expanding who can move money, initiate transfers, or change account settings.
Access and authority aren’t the same thing, and BankConnect is designed to enforce that distinction. It uses a single, secure API connection to pull balance and transaction data into HIA using trusted banking networks like Plaid and MX.
Data flows in one direction (into the system) through read-only, encrypted connections. Role-based permissions determine who can see what, so users only see the accounts and properties they’re authorized to view.
That means, controllers can open their dashboard and see current balances across the portfolio. Regional leaders see only the properties they’re responsible for. Owners and stakeholders can review cash positions without waiting for emailed reports. Everyone gets the visibility they need without loosening controls or introducing new risk.
Gain Real-Time Clarity Across Your Portfolio
Financial clarity isn’t just about cash visibility anymore. It’s about having the right information early enough to use it. Every extra step between the start of your day and understanding your cash position reduces how quickly finance can support the business. And heading into 2026, that speed is becoming a defining factor in how well hotel organizations operate under pressure.
When finance teams have clear, reliable access to cash inside the systems they already use, everything runs more efficiently. Less manual work. Fewer handoffs. Fewer second guesses.
If you’re ready to simplify cash access and reduce friction across your portfolio, see how HIA can make that a reality.
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.
