Insights / Sample output
Hotel monthly reporting pack
A USALI-format package as an owner or asset manager receives it. Figures are illustrative — the structure, line ordering and terminology are exactly what we produce. The blank statement is free to download as a working Excel file.
Contents: summary operating statement · departmental detail · statistics and flow-through · owner statement
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Hotel summary operating statement template
The blank statement below as a working file. Enter revenue, expense and room counts; every total, variance, margin and ratio calculates. Structured to follow the Uniform System's departmental layout, through departmental profit, gross operating profit and EBITDA. No email, no sign-up, nothing gated.
What is in it. Three sheets. Summary operating statement carries operating revenue and departmental expense by department, total departmental profit, the five undistributed operating expense lines, gross operating profit, management fees, the non-operating block and EBITDA before and after the reserve for replacement — each in fourteen columns covering month and year-to-date actual, budget and prior year with every variance in dollars and percent. Statistics and ratios calculates occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, TRevPAR, GOPPAR, GOP margin, CPOR and rooms departmental profit margin from two room-count inputs. How to use it covers filling it in, reading flow-through, and the three postings that cause the most rework.
Flow-through is the part most templates leave out. It answers one question — of the revenue you gained or lost against prior year, how much reached the profit line — and it is computed here against both total departmental profit and gross operating profit. A strong top line with weak flow-through is a cost conversation, not a demand one, and it is usually the first thing an owner or asset manager asks about.
This is an original working template built by Back of House Accounting. It is not the Uniform System itself and it is not a substitute for it: the standard is published by HFTP and must be purchased from usali.hftp.org. If a brand, lender or management agreement requires compliance with a specific edition, work from that publication. The account structure that feeds this statement is the free 187-account hotel chart of accounts; using the two together is what makes the statement reproduce the same way every month. If you would rather this was produced, reconciled and delivered for you by day ten, that is what our hotel accounting service does, with CFO and controller support for the analysis built on top of it.
Schedule 1
Summary operating statement
Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry, 12th revised edition presentation. Month and year-to-date against budget and prior year.
| Line | Actual | Budget | Var | % of rev | Prior yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating revenue | |||||
| Rooms | 1,842,400 | 1,760,000 | +82,400 | 71.8% | 1,681,900 |
| Food and beverage | 548,900 | 571,000 | −22,100 | 21.4% | 519,300 |
| Other operated departments | 118,700 | 124,000 | −5,300 | 4.6% | 112,400 |
| Miscellaneous income | 55,300 | 52,000 | +3,300 | 2.2% | 48,800 |
| Total operating revenue | 2,565,300 | 2,507,000 | +58,300 | 100.0% | 2,362,400 |
| Departmental expenses | |||||
| Rooms | 479,000 | 448,800 | −30,200 | 26.0% | 420,500 |
| Food and beverage | 417,200 | 399,700 | −17,500 | 76.0% | 368,700 |
| Other operated departments | 71,200 | 74,400 | +3,200 | 60.0% | 68,600 |
| Total departmental expenses | 967,400 | 922,900 | −44,500 | 37.7% | 857,800 |
| Total departmental profit | 1,597,900 | 1,584,100 | +13,800 | 62.3% | 1,504,600 |
| Undistributed operating expenses | |||||
| Administrative and general | 186,300 | 180,500 | −5,800 | 7.3% | 172,900 |
| Information and telecommunications | 41,000 | 40,100 | −900 | 1.6% | 38,400 |
| Sales and marketing | 154,000 | 150,400 | −3,600 | 6.0% | 141,700 |
| Property operations and maintenance | 102,600 | 100,300 | −2,300 | 4.0% | 96,800 |
| Energy, water and waste | 89,800 | 87,700 | −2,100 | 3.5% | 84,200 |
| Total undistributed | 573,700 | 559,000 | −14,700 | 22.4% | 534,000 |
| Gross operating profit | 1,024,200 | 1,025,100 | −900 | 39.9% | 970,600 |
| Management fees | 76,960 | 75,210 | −1,750 | 3.0% | 70,870 |
| Non-operating income and expense | 312,400 | 311,000 | −1,400 | 12.2% | 305,100 |
| EBITDA | 634,840 | 638,890 | −4,050 | 24.7% | 594,630 |
Illustrative figures for a 180-room full-service property. Note the pattern this presentation exposes: revenue beat budget by $58,300, and EBITDA still finished $4,050 behind it.
Schedule 2
Statistics and flow-through
| Statistic | Actual | Budget | Prior year | vs PY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rooms available | 5,580 | 5,580 | 5,580 | — |
| Rooms sold | 4,352 | 4,241 | 4,129 | +5.4% |
| Occupancy | 78.0% | 76.0% | 74.0% | +4.0 pts |
| Average daily rate | $423.35 | $415.00 | $407.34 | +3.9% |
| RevPAR | $330.18 | $315.41 | $301.42 | +9.5% |
| Cost per occupied room | $110.07 | $105.82 | $101.84 | +8.1% |
| Total revenue flow-through to GOP | 26.4% | — | — | — |
The commentary that ships with it
RevPAR grew 9.5% year over year on a four-point occupancy gain and a 3.9% rate increase — a strong top line. Only 26.4% of the incremental revenue reached gross operating profit. Cost per occupied room rose 8.1%, concentrated in rooms department labor, and food and beverage finished 3.9% behind budget on revenue while its departmental cost ratio held at 76%. The rooms labor variance is the actionable item; the F&B shortfall is a demand question, not a cost one.
That paragraph is the difference between a reporting package and a report. Numbers arrive with the explanation already written.
Schedule 2a
Where the revenue gain stopped
A revenue-up, profit-flat month always has a specific cause. The bridge names it.
Schedule 3
Owner statement
Produced to the management agreement. This is the page an asset manager or lender actually reads.
| EBITDA per Schedule 1 | 634,840 |
| FF&E reserve at 4.0% of total revenue | (102,612) |
| Net operating income | 532,228 |
| Debt service | (288,400) |
| Real estate taxes and insurance escrow | (61,750) |
| Cash flow available for distribution | 182,078 |
| Working capital adjustment | (25,000) |
| Distribution to ownership | 157,078 |
| Debt service coverage ratio | 1.85× |
| Covenant minimum | 1.25× |
Covenant position is calculated every period, not at the test date. If a ratio is trending toward its minimum you hear about it with months of warning, not weeks.
The standard
What the USALI format is
USALI stands for the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry. It is the hospitality industry’s common chart of accounts and reporting presentation, published and maintained by HFTP, with revisions overseen by the Global Finance Committee jointly sponsored by HFTP and the American Hotel & Lodging Association. It is not a legal requirement and it is not a replacement for GAAP. It is a presentation standard: GAAP governs how a transaction is measured, USALI governs where it appears in the hotel’s reporting and what it is called.
The reason it matters commercially is benchmarking. When every hotel classifies a cost the same way, an owner can compare one property against another, a lender can read a package without a translation exercise, and a management agreement can reference a profit line that both sides define identically. A hotel keeping books in its own private format is not comparable to anything — including its own prior year, once staff turn over.
The shape of the format
The architecture is departmental. Each operating department — rooms, food and beverage, other operated departments — carries its own revenue and its own direct expenses, and produces a departmental profit. Costs that cannot be assigned to a single department sit below that as undistributed operating expenses: administrative and general, information and telecommunications, sales and marketing, property operations and maintenance, and energy, water and waste. Subtracting those gives gross operating profit, the line most management agreements and incentive fees are written against. Management fees and non-operating income and expense — rent, property taxes, insurance — come off below GOP to reach EBITDA.
That ordering is the whole point. It separates what the operator controls from what the owner controls. A general manager is accountable above GOP. Debt and ground rent are not their variance to explain. The summary operating statement above follows exactly this sequence, with supporting departmental schedules and a statistics schedule carrying occupancy, average daily rate, RevPAR and cost per occupied room.
Current edition
What the 12th revised edition changed
Published 11 July 2024 by HFTP, with a mandatory adoption date of 1 January 2026. Early adoption was permitted. Reporting periods in the current fiscal year are expected to be on it.
If your monthly pack still presents an eleventh-edition layout, it is now behind the standard your benchmarks, your lender and your brand are using. The changes that most often require a chart of accounts adjustment rather than a cosmetic relabel:
| Change | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Energy, Water and Waste schedule | Replaces the former Utilities schedule. Broadens reporting from purchased utilities to usage, expense and greenhouse gas emissions, so the same schedule now serves ESG and sustainability reporting rather than sitting purely as a cost line. |
| Payroll full-time equivalents schedule | A new schedule tracking FTEs by department. Labor is the largest controllable cost in most properties, and headcount reported alongside dollars makes a labor variance readable as either a rate problem or a staffing problem. |
| Annual Mandatory Brand and Operator Costs schedule | A new annual schedule bringing brand and operator-mandated charges together in one place instead of distributing them invisibly across departments. For a franchised or managed hotel this is the schedule an owner has usually never been shown as a total. |
| All-inclusive reporting section | A dedicated section for all-inclusive properties, whose bundled pricing never mapped cleanly onto a rooms-and-outlets presentation, enabling benchmarking of comparable metrics. |
| Refined revenue and expense categories | Greater specificity in areas including guest loyalty program costs and executive lounge expenses, and expanded miscellaneous income categories. |
| Digital marketing detail | Marketing expense broken into current digital categories including paid search, display and social, rather than a single undifferentiated digital line. |
Source: HFTP and the Global Finance Committee. The official standard is the authority; this is a summary of the changes operators most often have to act on.
Conversion is a mapping exercise, not a rewrite. The work is deciding where existing account balances land under the new schedules, rebuilding the prior-year comparative so variances stay meaningful, and confirming that anything referenced in a management or loan agreement still calculates to the same number. Done mid-year without a restated comparative, the first pack under the new edition shows variances that are presentation artifacts rather than performance — which is the failure worth avoiding.
Conversion
Converting an eleventh-edition pack to the twelfth
Adoption became mandatory on 1 January 2026, so the monthly packages produced this fiscal year are the first that have to be on the new edition. It is a mapping exercise, and the order you do it in decides how much rework you buy.
HFTP’s own guidance to finance teams is a program view: run a gap analysis, pull accounting, operations, legal, IT and asset management into one working group, reconfigure systems, train staff, review contracts, pilot before rollout, and keep owners informed. That is the right frame. What follows is the ledger view underneath it — what actually changes in the chart of accounts and in the pack, in the sequence we work through it.
| Step | What it involves | What breaks if it is skipped |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Map every account to a schedule | Walk the existing chart line by line and tag each account to its destination schedule under the new edition. Most accounts do not move. The ones that do cluster in utilities, marketing, and brand and operator charges. | Balances land in the wrong schedule and departmental profit stops being comparable to the benchmark set you are measured against. |
| 2. Rebuild utilities as Energy, Water and Waste | Past the relabel, decide now whether consumption and emissions data can actually be sourced, and from where — meters, supplier statements, or a building management system. | The schedule exists but its sustainability columns stay empty, which is visible to owners, brands and lenders. |
| 3. Define an FTE before you build the FTE schedule | Fix the hours basis for one full-time equivalent, decide whether contract and agency labor count, and name the single system the hours come from. | Headcount is reported on a shifting basis, so a labor variance cannot be read as a rate problem or a staffing problem — which is the entire reason the schedule was added. |
| 4. Assemble the brand and operator costs schedule | Identify every brand or operator-mandated charge currently sitting inside departments: program and marketing assessments, reservation and loyalty charges, mandated technology. | The annual total an owner has usually never been shown stays invisible, which is the one thing this schedule exists to surface. |
| 5. Split digital marketing | Create separate capture for paid search, display and social instead of one undifferentiated digital line. | Marketing spend cannot be read against the channels that produced the revenue, so the schedule adds cost without adding an answer. |
| 6. Add the new capture points | Guest loyalty program costs, executive lounge revenue and expense, and the expanded miscellaneous income categories each need a place to land before the first period, not after it. | The amounts get swept into a catch-all and have to be unpicked from source documents later. |
| 7. Restate the prior-year comparative | Re-present last year on the new mapping before the first new-format package is issued. | Every variance in that first package is a presentation artifact and nobody can tell which movements are real. This is the most common and most damaging omission. |
| 8. Re-run every contractual calculation on both mappings | Gross operating profit, incentive fee thresholds, management fee bases, debt covenants. Confirm each one calculates to the same number before and after, or document precisely why it does not. | A fee or a covenant gets reported on a basis the agreement does not define. This is the expensive failure, and it surfaces in someone else’s review rather than yours. |
| 9. Pilot one property and one period | Produce a full package for a single property for a single month under the new mapping and reconcile it back to the old one, line for line. | Mapping errors are found across a whole portfolio in a reporting week instead of in one controlled pass. |
| 10. Tell owners and lenders before the package lands | A short note covering what changed in presentation, what did not change in performance, and which lines now carry a different label. | The first question about the new package is about the format rather than the results, and the credibility of the numbers takes the hit. |
HFTP and the Global Finance Committee publish and maintain the standard, and the official edition is the authority on what it requires. The sequence above is our own implementation order, not an extract from the standard.
The three that cause the most rework
Relabeling without remapping. Renaming the utilities schedule takes an afternoon. Deciding which accounts belong in it, and whether consumption data exists to fill it, is the actual conversion. A package that carries the new headings over the old structure reads as compliant and benchmarks as nonsense.
Converting mid-year with no restated comparative. Variances in the first new-format month then mix presentation changes with performance changes, and the two cannot be separated after the fact without redoing the work you were trying to avoid.
Treating the FTE schedule as a payroll export. It is a definition exercise first. Until the hours basis and the treatment of agency labor are settled and written down, the schedule produces a number that changes meaning from month to month.
If the conversion starts at the chart rather than the package, our full sample hotel chart of accounts sets out the account structure the schedules above are built from, including where departmental profit, GOP and EBITDA fall.
Common questions
Is there a free USALI format template?
The Uniform System itself is a copyrighted publication and is not available free — HFTP sells it as a book or subscription, and anything offering the publication itself as a free download is not legitimate. What can be made freely available is a working statement built to the same departmental structure, which is what we publish above: a summary operating statement in Excel and CSV with departmental profit, gross operating profit, EBITDA, every variance and the standard hotel ratios already calculating. Use it to produce and check your own reporting; buy the standard itself if a brand, lender or management agreement requires compliance with a specific edition.
What is a summary operating statement?
The top sheet of a hotel reporting pack. It shows each operated department's revenue and direct expense, the departmental profit each one produced, then the undistributed operating expenses that cannot fairly be charged to a single department — administrative and general, information and telecommunications systems, sales and marketing, property operation and maintenance, and utilities — arriving at gross operating profit. Management fees and the non-operating items sit below that, down to EBITDA. The departmental schedules behind it show how each line was built.
What does USALI stand for?
The Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry. It is a standardized chart of accounts and financial reporting presentation for hotels, published and maintained by HFTP.
Is USALI mandatory?
Not by law. It is an industry standard rather than a regulation. In practice it is often effectively required by a third party: brand and management agreements, lenders and institutional owners commonly specify USALI presentation, and benchmarking data is built on it. The 12th revised edition carried a mandatory adoption date of 1 January 2026 within the standard itself.
What is the current USALI edition?
The 12th revised edition, published 11 July 2024, with mandatory adoption from 1 January 2026 and early adoption permitted.
How is USALI different from GAAP?
They answer different questions. GAAP governs recognition and measurement — whether an amount is revenue, and in which period. USALI governs classification and presentation — which department a cost belongs to, what it is named, and where it appears relative to gross operating profit. A hotel produces GAAP-compliant financial statements and reports them in USALI format; the two are complementary, not alternatives.
What is a departmental schedule?
A supporting statement behind a single line of the summary operating statement. The rooms schedule, for example, carries rooms revenue and the direct expenses of running the rooms department down to rooms departmental profit. The summary operating statement shows the totals; the schedules show how each was built.
What is flow-through and why does it appear in the pack?
Flow-through is the share of an incremental revenue change that reaches gross operating profit. It is the fastest read on whether a revenue gain was actually worth having. In the sample above, revenue rose year over year but only 26.4% of the increase reached GOP — a strong top line and a weak conversion, which points straight at a cost question rather than a demand one.
Does a small or independent hotel need USALI?
Size is not really the test; comparability is. An independent property with no brand, no management agreement and no debt covenant has more freedom in how it presents results. The moment it wants to benchmark against the market, refinance, or sell, a private format has to be converted anyway — usually retroactively, and usually under time pressure.
When does a hotel have to be on the 12th revised edition?
HFTP set a mandatory adoption date of 1 January 2026, with early adoption permitted before that. Reporting periods in the current fiscal year are therefore expected to be presented on the twelfth edition. It is a presentation standard rather than a law, so no regulator enforces it — but brands, lenders, management agreements and every benchmarking data set are moving to it, which is the practical enforcement.
Do we have to restate prior-year figures when we convert?
Nothing compels a restatement, but a package without one is hard to use. If last year sits on the eleventh-edition mapping and this year sits on the twelfth, every variance in the first package mixes a presentation change with a performance change and the two cannot be separated by the reader. Re-presenting the prior year on the new mapping before the first package goes out is the step that keeps the variance column meaningful.
We produce USALI-format packages for hotel and lodging clients as part of hotel accounting, and build the owner and lender reporting around them through our CFO and controller service. If you are converting to the 12th revised edition mid-year, the comparative restatement is the part worth getting right the first time.