There’s a well-known maxim in business studies: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” In the hospitality industry, the method used to control all aspects of the business is known as USALI or the Uniform System of Accounting for Lodging Industries.

Why Is It so Important to Understand USALI in the Rooms Department Context?

Hotel managers have to have access to information concerning various departments: F&B, MODs, A&G, S&M, POMEC, and of course rooms. These details can’t be presented in any haphazard manner, though.

Essentially the entire hotel industry, from New York to Bangalore, has settled on USALI as the gold standard for reporting and analyzing business performance. This decision has had the following benefits:

• It’s easy to compare the relative performance of various hotels, even of different types.
• It’s less likely that a hotel will fall into the trap of using inaccurate accounting practices.
• Summarized information is easy to understand and quick to absorb.

For a room department supervisor, the last point is especially important. Using the USALI scheme correctly makes compiling reports very easy. Neglecting to do so can easily cause you to end up with a jumble of “number spaghetti” nobody can make sense of.

 

Approaching USALI from the rooms department’s perspective gives a student a chance to get their feet wet with learning the system as a whole. This is mandatory for anyone who wishes to be promoted to a senior position, or someone with a financial background hoping to enter the industry.

What this Course Will Teach You:

This is an intermediate-level course. Though parts of it are challenging especially if you don’t have any accounting experience. Each idea is introduced step by step, though, in a syllabus comprised of 20 short lectures.

After working through the material, you will:

• Know the standard definitions of the various necessary accounting terms used in USALI.
• Understand how to calculate revenue and expenses for a hotel’s rooms department.
• Accurately differentiate between fixed and variable expenses.
• Have a basic understanding of some USALI operating statistics.
• Be able to draw up a profit-and-loss statement for a rooms department.

It is possible to learn USALI on the job. This course, however, will present the necessary concepts in an accurate, consistent, and systematic manner – without this theoretical framework, it’s very difficult to truly understand how proper accounting makes everyone’s jobs easier.