Chains and groups: comparing the restaurant of every hotel with the same rule

When a hotel group goes from two properties to six, the restaurant of each hotel stops being the manager’s problem and becomes the corporate director’s problem. Each manager reports their own way: one includes tips in sales, another records included breakfast at zero, another counts room charges as front desk revenue. The six numbers have the same name and do not measure the same thing. Comparing like that is not comparing: it is guessing with spreadsheets.

Comparing is not making everything the same

The fear of any hotel manager when corporate talks about a standard is that the city hotel’s menu will be imposed on their beach hotel. That fear is founded when the standard gets confused with uniformity. But the standard a group needs is not the same dish everywhere: it is the same rule for recording, closing and reporting, so that when the director reads "revenue per occupied room" across six hotels, they are reading the same definition six times.

Each hotel keeps its menu, its prices, its hours and its team. What it shares with the others is the skeleton: catalog categories, the list of payment methods, the shift close format, the logical closing time and the comp and void rules. On that skeleton, every restaurant is different, and that is exactly why it can be compared.

The chains and groups page (Chains and groups) shows how an account with several properties is organized, where corporate sets the skeleton and each hotel runs its own restaurant.

The single standard: base catalog, categories and payment methods

The standard starts with categories. Food, domestic drinks, premium drinks, included breakfast at allocation value, extras and comps: the same six in all six hotels, with the same name and the same ledger account behind them. One hotel may have two hundred products and another forty, but they all fall into the same categories, and that is why the consolidated report builds itself.

It continues with payment methods. Cash, card, room charge with verified folio, charge to a company account, comp with a reason. No property adds "other" or "pending" on its own. If one hotel needs a new method, for example an agency voucher, it is added from corporate for everyone, even if only one uses it.

And it ends with the discipline rules: comps require a reason in every hotel, voids after sending to the kitchen require a supervisor’s authorization in every hotel, room charges are verified against the folio in every hotel. The article on room charge and why a text field is not enough (Room charge: why a text field is not enough) explains why that last rule is the one that closes the most leakage.

What each hotel decides on its own

• The menu products and their prices, within the common categories.
• The hours of each revenue center and how many revenue centers it has.
• Modifiers, recipes and suppliers.
• Who is a supervisor and who is a server, within the roles defined by corporate.
• The allocation value of included breakfast, as long as it is documented and approved by the group controller.

Permissions by property: who sees what

In a group, the permissions problem has two sides. On one side, the manager of the beach hotel has no reason to see the city hotel’s sales, let alone change its prices. On the other, the corporate director and the group controller have to see all six hotels on one screen without asking anyone to send them anything. If the permissions do not solve both sides at once, someone ends up sharing a password.

The golden rule is that the role is defined once from corporate and assigned per property. That way, when the group opens hotel number seven, nothing is invented: users are created with the roles that already exist and the hotel enters the consolidated report from its first shift close.

The same metric in every hotel

With the standard and the permissions in place, the metric becomes comparable. Food and beverage revenue per occupied room is calculated the same way in all six: net revenue, without tax or tips, with room charges included and included breakfast at allocation value, divided by occupied room nights reported by the front desk. If one hotel calculates it differently, the consolidated figure lies, and that is why the definition lives in the system and not in each manager.

The same applies to comps as a share of sales, ingredient cost as a share of sales and voids after sending to the kitchen. Four metrics, with the same definition in every property, and with that the director has enough to know where to pay attention each week. The article on what USALI is and why it suits you (What USALI is and why it pays off even with twenty rooms) explains where those definitions come from.

An illustrative example with numbers

The figures below are invented to show the calculation. They do not describe any group or the industry. They serve to see why the hotel that sells the most is not always the one that operates best.

The beach hotel sells the most in total and has the highest revenue per occupied room: 432,000 over 2,160 nights gives 200. At first glance it is the best. But its comps are 6 % of sales, three times the city hotel’s. In the example’s numbers, that is 25,920 a month given away, against 7,560 in the city. If the beach hotel brought its comps down to 2 %, it would recover 17,280 a month without selling one more dish.

The highway hotel has the lowest revenue per occupied room, 100, and that could be a problem or it could be its segment: a traveler who arrives late and leaves early does not have dinner. To know which, it is compared against its own history, not against the beach. What is compared across the three is discipline, and there the highway hotel is the best in the group with 1 % comps.

The corporate director’s dashboard

The corporate director does not need to see orders. They need a screen with the six hotels in rows and four metrics in columns, the current month against the same month last year, and a flag when a hotel breaks its own pattern. That screen is read in five minutes every Monday and decides who gets a call that week.

• Revenue per occupied room by hotel, against the same month last year.
• Comps and voids as a share of sales by hotel, against the group average.
• Room charges that never reached the folio, by hotel, which should be zero.
• Ingredient cost as a share of sales by hotel, against its own target.
• Accumulated cash differences for the month by hotel and by revenue center.

The page for the owner (Owner) shows this view: the same one the director uses for the group, with the ability to drill into any hotel down to the close of a specific shift without asking anyone for anything.

What breaks the comparison

• A hotel that adds tips to sales because they come in on the same card payment.
• One hotel that records included breakfast at zero and another at menu price.
• A different logical closing time in each property: the same Saturday has Sunday sales in one and not in another.
• A hotel that counts room charges as front desk revenue rather than restaurant revenue.
• Roles defined by each manager, where a "supervisor" can void in one hotel and not in another.
• Reports that each hotel builds in its own spreadsheet and emails on the fifth of the month.

What to do this week

1. Ask each hotel for its definition of revenue per occupied room for last month and compare the six: you will find the differences in criteria.
2. Set with the group controller the catalog categories and the list of payment methods that apply to every property.
3. Define roles from corporate and assign them per property, removing shared logins.
4. Establish the same logical closing time in every property starting next Monday.
5. Build the four-metric dashboard by hotel and review it on Monday with the managers, exceptions only.

Inn Restaurant runs several properties in one account: corporate sets the standard and the roles, each hotel runs its menu, and the consolidated dashboard is read without anyone sending spreadsheets. If you want to see the dashboard with three of your hotels in fifteen minutes, the demo is booked on the contact page (contact).