Four hotels, four spreadsheets, one owner at the kitchen table
You own four hotels. Two were bought already running on one PMS, one runs on another, and the newest is on a third because the previous owner had a contract that has not run out. Each morning, each general manager or night auditor emails a spreadsheet with yesterday's figures. One counts complimentary rooms as occupied and one does not. One shows revenue including breakfast, another excludes it. The fourth arrives at eleven because the manager was covering reception.
At the weekly meeting, you want to know how next month looks across the group. Each GM gives a figure from their own PMS forecast report, run on a different day. Comparing them feels like comparing guesses.
Why group reporting stays manual
Each PMS has good reports for its own hotel. None of them knows about the other hotels, and each defines its figures slightly differently.
- Different PMSs across the group, often for historic reasons.
- Different definitions of occupancy, rooms available, and room revenue.
- Figures typed from reports into spreadsheets, with the errors that brings.
- Forward-looking figures (on the books, pickup) are harder to pull than yesterday's.
- Outlet sales, events and spa revenue sit in separate systems again.
Replacing every PMS with one might solve it eventually, but that is a large project for a reporting problem.
What waiting for figures costs
Decisions are made later and with less confidence than they should be. A soft weekend at one hotel is noticed when it is too late to do anything about it. General managers spend part of every morning producing a report instead of running their hotel. And when a figure looks wrong, the owner has no way of checking it without asking for another report.
Lenders, investors and partners ask for group figures too, and each time someone builds a new spreadsheet by hand.
The spreadsheets also hide mistakes. A figure typed into the wrong row, a formula dragged one line too far or a day missed during a holiday week can sit in the group totals for months. Nobody notices until the year-end figures from the accountant do not match the running total the owner has been looking at.
How we build a group morning dashboard
- We connect to each hotel's PMS through its API or scheduled report exports. Mews, Cloudbeds, Guestline and Opera Cloud are among the PMS products with APIs, and older systems can often send scheduled exports.
- We agree one set of definitions for the group: what counts as a room sold, how complimentary and out-of-order rooms are treated, what is room revenue.
- Each morning, yesterday's figures are pulled and calculated to those definitions for every hotel.
- On-the-books figures for the coming weeks and months are pulled on the same day for every hotel, so forward comparisons are fair.
- Where it helps, EPOS, events and spa figures are added from their own systems.
- The dashboard shows the group total and each hotel side by side, with the same layout every day, and a short email summary for anyone who prefers it.
| Figure | Today | On the dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy | Each hotel's own definition | One group definition, same for all |
| Average rate and revenue per available room | Typed from reports | Calculated from source data |
| Next month on the books | Run on different days | Pulled the same morning for all |
| Outlet sales | Separate email from each restaurant | Alongside rooms, per hotel |
Where a hotel's PMS cannot share data automatically, we look at scheduled exports or a simple upload step before suggesting any system change.
The first coffee, once the dashboard runs
You open the dashboard at seven. Yesterday's figures for all four hotels are there, calculated the same way. Next month's position is side by side, and you can see that the hotel on the coast is behind where it was at this point last year while the city hotel is ahead. You send one message to the coast GM, with the figures, rather than asking for a report.
The general managers get their mornings back. The weekly meeting starts from shared numbers. And when you are ready to move everyone onto one PMS, you do it for operational reasons rather than just to make reporting work.
Signs group reporting is holding you back
- Daily figures arrive by email from each hotel.
- Your hotels run on different PMSs.
- Figures do not compare because each hotel calculates them differently.
- Forward-looking figures across the group take days to assemble.
- General managers spend part of every morning building reports.