What Is a Hotel Flash Report?

Definition

A hotel flash report is a daily snapshot of a hotel's key performance numbers, such as occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, and revenue.

Monthly financial statements tell a hotel what happened. The flash report tells the team what is happening. It is usually produced every morning for the prior day, with month-to-date and year-to-date totals, so general managers, operators, and owners can react before small problems become a bad month.

Core metrics to include

Most flash reports cover these numbers for the day, month to date, and year to date, compared to budget, forecast, and last year:

• Occupancy: rooms sold divided by rooms available.
• ADR (average daily rate): room revenue divided by rooms sold.
• RevPAR (revenue per available room): room revenue divided by rooms available, or occupancy multiplied by ADR.
• Room revenue and total revenue, including food and beverage and other departments.
• Food and beverage covers and average check, where relevant.
• Labor: hours or cost compared to budget, often by department.
• On-the-books business for upcoming days, from the property management system.

Using the same definitions as USALI keeps flash numbers consistent with month-end financial statements.

Property-level vs. portfolio-level flash

A property-level flash helps a general manager run one hotel. It shows the detail behind the numbers: room types, segments, outlets, and labor by department.

A portfolio-level flash helps a management company or owner see every hotel at once. It rolls up properties and lets leadership compare them by region, brand, or owner so an underperforming hotel stands out quickly. Building it by hand means collecting a report from every property and combining them in a spreadsheet each morning.

Where flash report data comes from

• Property management system (PMS): rooms sold, rooms available, room revenue, and reservations on the books.
• Point of sale (POS): food, beverage, and outlet revenue and covers.
• Labor and timekeeping systems: hours and payroll cost by department.
• Budget and forecast: usually from the financial system or a planning tool.

Automating the flash with integrations

The manual flash is a daily copy-and-paste exercise that is easy to get wrong. Automation connects the source systems so data flows in on a schedule. Daily revenue and statistics from the PMS and POS post to the general ledger by property, and business intelligence tools such as ProfitSword can combine operational and financial data into one view.

With a system like Sage Intacct, each hotel is its own entity and each statistic is tracked by property using the dimensional general ledger. The same data feeds the daily flash, the month-end close, and owner reporting, so the numbers agree.

Acumen helps hotel management companies connect their PMS, POS, and labor systems so the portfolio flash builds itself.

Example: a morning flash for a 12-hotel portfolio

A management company's regional director starts the day with one portfolio flash instead of 12 emailed spreadsheets. It shows yesterday's occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR for each hotel next to budget and last year. One hotel's RevPAR is 15% below budget month to date, while labor hours are on plan. The director calls the general manager before 9 a.m. to review rate strategy, rather than discovering the gap in the month-end P&L three weeks later.