Growth can create new opportunities for hospitality organizations, but it can also create significantly more work for the finance team.
As properties, locations, and legal entities are added, processes that once worked well can become difficult to maintain. Separate accounting databases, manual consolidations, spreadsheet-based reporting, and intercompany transactions can make it harder to close the books efficiently and understand how the organization is performing.
One growing hospitality company experienced these challenges as it expanded across dozens of entities. Its finance team needed a better way to manage entity-level accounting while maintaining consolidated visibility across the organization.
After moving to Gravity Software, the company reduced the time required to manage intercompany transactions from days to approximately 30 minutes, accelerated its month-end close by 30%, and reduced manual consolidations by approximately 90%.
Its experience illustrates how the right financial structure can help hospitality organizations continue to grow without requiring accounting complexity and manual work to grow at the same rate.
Hospitality organizations often grow by adding properties, opening new locations, acquiring businesses, or creating separate legal entities for different parts of the organization.
That growth can create additional complexity for the finance team. Each entity may require its own financial records, while leadership still needs to understand how individual properties and businesses are performing as part of the organization as a whole.
For this hospitality company, managing numerous legal entities in separate accounting databases created several challenges:
The challenge wasn't simply managing more transactions. The finance team needed to maintain accurate financial information at the individual entity level while also providing leadership with timely, consolidated information across the organization.
As the number of entities increased, the existing process required more manual work and made it harder for the finance team to provide the financial visibility leadership needed.
Managing multiple entities in separate accounting databases created more work each time the organization grew.
The finance team had to maintain financial information for individual entities while also bringing that information together for consolidated reporting. Intercompany activity added another layer of complexity because transactions between related entities had to be identified, recorded, reconciled, and eliminated before consolidated financial statements could be completed.
Spreadsheets helped bridge some of those gaps, but they also added manual steps to the reporting process. As more entities were added, the finance team was spending increasing amounts of time gathering information, reconciling activity, and preparing reports.
For leadership, the challenge was visibility. They needed to understand how individual properties and entities were performing while also seeing the financial performance of the organization as a whole.
The existing process could produce that information, but it required too much manual work to continue scaling efficiently.
The hospitality company needed a way to simplify accounting across its entities without losing the financial detail required for each individual business.
Rather than continuing to maintain separate accounting databases, the organization moved to Gravity Software to manage its entities within a centralized accounting environment.
With multi-entity accounting, finance teams can maintain separate books for individual legal entities while managing financial information across the organization within a single system. This makes it easier to maintain entity-level control while providing leadership with consolidated visibility across properties and businesses.
For this hospitality company, centralizing its entities also helped simplify one of its most time-consuming processes: intercompany accounting.
Transactions between related entities no longer required the same level of manual reconciliation across separate accounting databases. The finance team could manage intercompany activity as part of a more connected accounting process while maintaining the financial records of each entity.
That change had a significant impact on how much time the team spent managing intercompany activity.
Intercompany accounting had become one of the most time-consuming parts of the finance team's close process.
With entities maintained in separate accounting databases, the team had to work through multiple balance sheets, identify corresponding transactions, reconcile balances, and process eliminations before consolidated financial statements could be completed.
After moving to Gravity Software, that process changed significantly.
One member of the finance team explained:
“Managing intercompany transactions used to take days while working through multiple balance sheets. With Gravity Software, the entire process now takes about 30 minutes across dozens of entities.”
Reducing the manual work associated with intercompany accounting gave the finance team more time to review financial performance instead of spending days reconciling activity between entities.
It also helped address a broader challenge: getting timely financial information into the hands of leadership.
Reducing the time spent on intercompany accounting was only one part of the improvement.
Since implementing Gravity Software, the hospitality finance team has reported measurable changes to its accounting and reporting processes, including:
For the finance team, these improvements meant less time gathering, reconciling, and consolidating financial information.
For leadership, they meant better visibility into how individual properties and entities were performing and how those results contributed to the organization as a whole. Finance leaders could more easily compare performance across locations, identify trends, understand profitability, and make more informed decisions as the organization continued to grow.
The value wasn't simply closing the books faster. It was giving the finance team more time to understand the financial information and provide leadership with the insight needed to make decisions.
The accounting challenges this company experienced are not unique to one hospitality organization.
As hotel groups, restaurant groups, resorts, entertainment businesses, and other hospitality organizations add properties and legal entities, finance teams often face the same question: how do you support growth without adding the same amount of accounting complexity?
Separate company files and spreadsheets may work when an organization has only a few entities. As the business expands, however, those processes can require more time for intercompany accounting, consolidations, reconciliations, and reporting.
A more scalable approach to multi-entity accounting can help finance teams maintain the financial records of individual entities while creating greater visibility across the organization.
For hospitality organizations evaluating their accounting processes, several questions are worth considering:
The goal isn't simply to automate more accounting tasks. It is to create a financial structure that allows the organization to grow without requiring the finance team's workload to increase at the same rate.
Growth shouldn't require finance teams to keep adding accounting databases, spreadsheets, and manual processes each time the organization adds another property or entity.
For this hospitality company, bringing its financial information together helped reduce the manual work associated with intercompany accounting and consolidation while giving the finance team greater visibility across the organization. This type of centralized accounting environment can become increasingly important as organizations add properties and legal entities.
Gravity Software is built natively on the Microsoft Power Platform, allowing growing organizations to manage multiple entities while connecting with Microsoft technologies already used across the business.
For hospitality organizations reaching a similar stage of growth, the question isn't simply whether the current accounting system works today. It's whether that system can continue to support additional properties, entities, and financial complexity without requiring the finance team to add the same amount of manual work.
If your organization is evaluating whether its current accounting system can support its next stage of growth, schedule a personalized demo to see how Gravity Software can simplify financial management across multiple hospitality entities.
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