Reservation systems and accounting systems describe the same business in different languages. Somebody translates between them every month. It does not have to be a person.
Whoever does this translation builds up a set of rules that exist nowhere except in their judgement: which channel maps to which account, how a cancellation is treated, what happens when a payout spans two periods. It works well until they are unavailable, and then the close either waits or produces numbers that quietly differ from last month's on the same underlying events.
We document that mapping with whoever signs off your accounts, then build it so it runs the same way every period. The rules become something your team can read and question rather than something one person applies from memory. Consistency across periods is the real gain here, and it is what makes year-on-year comparisons trustworthy.
11 hours of monthly data entry, removed for an operator running 10 properties across 4 countries.
Month-end used to take days. It now takes roughly 40 minutes. Four weeks to build.
If two months would be treated differently depending on who closed them, that is worth fixing before it compounds.