Hospitality
AccountingCornell

Certificate Program

An operating statement tells the tale of a hotel's performance, and in this course, you'll begin to decipher this narrative at an overarching level. You'll dissect the hotel operating statement, scrutinizing each major section and the intricate story it weaves. As you delve into the specifics of hospitality lodging accounts, your analysis of the reported figures will deepen, helping you discern the hotel's current situation: How is it yielding profit? Where are its pain points? You might observe that while the hotel's revenues are on an upward trend, its expenses are also climbing. Why is that? What's the underlying cause? Should management adjust its strategy?

Even if you're not an accountant or the person responsible for crafting the operating statement, you play a significant role within the hotel property management. The lodging industry employs a unique reporting structure using uniform terms and definitions, known as the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI). This system, while being unique to the hotel industry and not widely taught, is essential for hotel decision makers. You need to build a strong enough understanding of USALI to interpret the numbers and make informed decisions accurately.

The operating statement serves as a call to action. Every decision you make has ramifications. The key question is: What will you champion?

Imagine that you know that the administrative expenses for your hotel are 6%. Looking at other properties within your peer set, you can see that your competitors' administrative expenses are 4.5%. Is your property getting value out of spending more? How can you tell? What changes might you choose to make in response to that information?

As a hotel manager or decision maker, you want to analyze what the metrics are telling you so that you can make informed decisions that will increase profitability for your property. In this course, you will practice analyzing leading hotel benchmarking reports and their provided industry data, drawing inferences about what it means for you. You will delve into the process of benchmarking so that you can identify how well one property is performing in comparison to its peers. Using relevant metrics, including revenue per available room, dollars per available room, dollars per occupied room, expenses on an occupied room basis, and occupancy percentages, hotel owners and operators can compare the financial performance of their properties with industry-wide averages of a similar profile.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Examining the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI)

If you want to understand a hotel property fully, you need to read and analyze three critical financial statements: its operating statement, its balance sheet, and its cash flow statement. These statements will answer key questions, including: In what ways is this property performing well or underperforming?

Using provided data for a sample property, you will practice reading and interpreting financial statements to assess areas of strength and weakness, then you'll apply that understanding to critical higher-level decisions from different perspectives. What improvements would you make to this property if you were the owner? What improvements would you want to make to this property if you were the GM, who typically doesn't see the balance sheet? How about as an asset manager? These three people will see things differently, so how and what they advocate will differ. You want to be in the position to review the financials from all points of view and make the most informed decisions you can.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Examining the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI)
• Benchmarking Hotel Performance

In this course, you will practice using accounting tools to answer one critical question facing all hotel managers, owners, and operators: How much of the additional revenue generated from one period to another is retained as profit? As a manager or owner in the lodging industry, your ultimate goal is to make better decisions to improve your property's bottom line, but the challenge with any hotel is that so much of its costs are fixed, which means you incur those costs regardless of whether the property is turning a profit.

You will work with Excel to practice analyzing and interpreting costs so that you can better manage them and use a regression formula to calculate change in profit and revenue over time. You will also explore the cost behavior of a property so that you can understand what's causing the costs to be incurred, and you will examine utility costs over time: How much of that is fixed and how much is variable based on usage? You will calculate "flow-through," which tells you how much of your revenue "flows through" to the bottom line. You will calculate the break-even point for a property and the margin of safety. Of particular significance to decision makers, you will identify what you can and cannot influence, both in the short term and the long term.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Examining the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI)
• Benchmarking Hotel Performance
• Using Financial Statements for Decision Making

In this course, you will pull together the tools of USALI accounting, using revenue and cost projections, to prepare an operating budget for a property.

Hotel decision makers use the operating budget to identify ways to control costs and improve profitability. An operating budget is a living — not static — document; you will develop skills to monitor it over time and develop best practices for interpreting what it's telling you to take appropriate corrective action. You will practice working with occupancy estimates that come from external sources in the industry, such as CBRE's widely used economic analysis reports. You will develop cost estimates, including fixed, variable, and mixed.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Examining the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI)
• Benchmarking Hotel Performance
• Using Financial Statements for Decision Making
• Applying Managerial Accounting Tools to Improve Flow Through

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Hospitality Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll discuss how both day-to-day operations and strategic goal setting in the hospitality sector have rapidly evolved over the past two years, opening up new space for real-time conversations about the future of the industry. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to various areas of the industry, examining the innovations and accommodations you have all had to make throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and strategizing on future directions. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: April 1 and 2, 2025

• Tuesday, April 1, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending
• Wednesday, April 2, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.