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USALI — the one hotel accounting language, and why it matters right now

The Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry is the standard operating-statement format that makes any two hotels comparable, and the 12th Revised Edition is mandatory for reporting periods beginning January 1, 2026. Learn one page — the Summary Operating Statement — and you can read any hotel's P&L in its own language, from a two-page broker package to an institutional owner's monthly report.

USALI organizes a hotel's income statement into three layers: departmental revenue and expense (rooms, food & beverage, other operated departments, each shown at its own profit), undistributed operating expenses (administrative & general, sales & marketing, property operations & maintenance, utilities — costs that support the whole property rather than one department), and the result, Gross Operating Profit (GOP) — revenue less departmental expenses less undistributed expenses, before fixed charges, reserve, debt service, or income tax.

On a worked property, total revenue of $3,421,804 (rooms revenue of $3,290,196 plus other revenue of $131,608) nets down through departmental and undistributed expense to a GOP of $1,416,758 — a 41.4% GOP margin. That single ratio, GOP as a percentage of total revenue, is the fastest cross-property comparison the format enables.

The 12th Revised Edition, effective for periods beginning January 1, 2026, is the version every US hotel financial statement and most international ones now target. If a seller's package or an operator's monthly report doesn't map cleanly to the Summary Operating Statement, that alone is worth asking about before trusting any ratio built from it.

#hotels#hospitality#USALI#P&L#GOP

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