Rob Smith has advice for anyone taking over a hotel, and it isn't to start with the P&L.
"If you want to take over a property, the very first thing you do is go spend two or three nights doing night audit with your team, because you will see everything," said Smith, CFO at Crescent Hotels & Resorts.
Smith started as a 19-year-old night auditor, and he still talks about an auditor in Miami who could spot which bartender was stealing because he saw every transaction cross the desk. Night audit is the seam where operations becomes finance. At most hotels, it's still treated as two separate jobs.
The disconnect came up often at Optimize 2026, Otelier's customer advisory event last month. Finance leaders and operators kept landing in the same place: Every decision on property carries a dollar value.
Kelly Baker, Accounting & Operations Training Manager at Stonebridge, came up through operations before moving into accounting. Her motto: "Accounting is operations." "We try and separate, 'Oh, that's an accounting issue,' or, 'That's operations,' but it really is one and the same," she said.
Here are some ways to close the gap:
Owners often blame finance for problems it didn't create. "Finance isn't the person that checked them out at the front desk with a $1,000 balance due and didn't settle the check," Smith said.
Trace your most common month-end corrections back to the moment they started – a skipped settlement, an unexplained comp, a charge posted to the wrong GL. That list becomes your training plan.
Smith sees forecast accuracy slipping across the industry, often because no one wants to give an owner bad news. The damage compounds. "If your forecast is not right, your labor forecast is not right, your expense controls are not right, your cash flow is not right," he said.
The fix is putting department heads inside the numbers. Often times, the leaders who prepare schedules and order supplies do so without knowledge of the P&L. Teach them, then hold them to a forecast they helped build.
When Stonebridge roughly doubled in size through an acquisition, Baker found half the portfolio coding transactions one way and half another. She took over mapping for the whole portfolio and standardized it.
Common codes sound like accounting housekeeping. They're what lets an operator compare hotels – and a controller trust the comparison.
Crescent centralized as much payroll as it could, largely because labor laws – particularly in California – change faster than property teams can track. Properties still do the work, while a central team gathers the data, reviews it and checks details like whether overtime is calculated daily or weekly.
Same with night audit: Automate the routine reporting, then give auditors higher-value work, like clearing misposted city ledger charges that would otherwise land on accounting the next morning.
Technology doesn't create collaboration, but it can remove the friction that kills it. Smith remembers routing paper audit packs for signatures. DigiAudit now gives Crescent one place where finance and operations see the same information – including who hasn't signed off.
When finance and operations act as one, the work that eats up a GM's week gets faster and cleaner: budgeting and forecasting, scheduling and payroll, procurement, and audits. Fewer corrections, fewer chase-down emails, fewer month-end surprises.
That's labor hours back.
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