Hotel Accounting & Owner Reporting

Full hotel accounting, start to finish

Full accounting means the whole back office moves to our desk. Nothing is left half in the building and half with us.

• Night audit. Each day’s room revenue, taxes and payments are balanced and closed overnight.
• Accounts payable. We pay the hotel’s bills, and we read every one before it’s paid.
• Accounts receivable. Direct bill accounts, group balances and anything else owed to the hotel is billed and collected.
• Payroll and people. We run payroll. We hire, we train, and when it has to happen, we let people go, with the paperwork that comes with each.
• Budgets and the P&L. The month is set against the budget, line by line.
• Owner reporting. One report, written for the person whose money is in the building.

Why we read every bill before we pay it

Invoice review is the least glamorous work in hotel management. It’s also where money goes missing.

On one property we found $2,000 in telecom charges the hotel should never have paid. We recovered it and cut the recurring phone bill by $425 a month. On another, laundry commissions had been misdirected. That came back as a $3,200 reimbursement, along with upgraded guest-facing equipment from the vendor.

$2,000

in telecom charges recovered for one hotel

$425 a month

off the same hotel’s recurring phone bill

$3,200

in misdirected laundry commissions reimbursed

Errors like these surface when the accountant knows what a telecom or laundry contract in a hotel should look like. That knowledge is the reason we keep accounting inside the company.

Who does the work

Kenneth Beal, our corporate controller, leads the accounting team. He has worked in hotel accounting since the mid-1980s, much of it in Southern California hotels, and joined Peak in December 2024. Jessica Gonzales, our accounting specialist, handles the day-to-day with him.

Kenneth Beal
Corporate Controller

Jessica Gonzales
Accounting Specialist

Walter Barela
Principal

Walter Barela has run hotels for more than 45 years. He held senior management roles with Hilton Hotels Corporation, Regent Hotels and West Coast Hotels, and served two terms on the board of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Today he sits on the board of the Latino Hotel Association. He reviews the numbers the way an owner does, because for most of his career he has answered to owners.

Accounting for hotels we don’t manage

Some owners want their own GM running the property and an experienced firm keeping the books. We take on accounting by itself for hotels we don’t operate. The Waldport Inn on the Oregon coast is one of those clients. The work is the same, from the night audit through the owner report.

For an owner considering full management later, it’s also a clear look at how we handle your money first.

Hotel books run on their own clock

Most businesses close their day once. A hotel closes it every night, with rates that may have changed that morning and a group block that can move the whole month. Taxes add another layer. In New Mexico, lodgers’ tax is collected for the city or county and filed separately from the state’s gross receipts tax, each on its own forms.

We keep books for historic hotels like the Gadsden in Douglas, Arizona, and for branded select-service hotels along the interstate, across six states. The books look different at each one. The discipline doesn’t.

Call us at 505-244-1114, or send a note through our contact page. Tell us about the property and how the books are kept today.