USALI for hotel owners: reading the departmental profit and loss statement

USALI is the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry, a voluntary reporting standard published by HFTP. It sorts revenue and costs into operated departments, undistributed expenses and fixed charges, ending at gross operating profit and EBITDA, so two hotels, or two months, can be compared line by line.

The management pack arrives in USALI form, the trial balance arrives in the Uniform Chart of Accounts, and the two do not meet at a glance. Most owners then read one and ignore the other, which is exactly how a bad month stays invisible until year end. After reading this article you will be able to read the USALI statement line by line, know which lines to question first, and ask your accountant for the one document that connects the two reports.

What is USALI, and who publishes it?#

USALI is a standard chart of accounts and report layout for hotels, published by Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP). It fixes where each revenue and cost line sits, not what the numbers should be. The American Hotel & Lodging Association describes it as the worldwide authoritative standard for lodging financial and operating reporting (AHLA, 11 July 2024 (opens in a new tab)).

The current edition matters to Turkish hoteliers for a specific reason. The 12th Revised Edition has an adoption date of 1 January 2026 and adds a section on reporting revenue and expenses for all-inclusive hotels (AHLA, 11 July 2024). For a resort selling packages, that is the practical reason to look at the new edition rather than an older one.

What USALI buys you is a shared vocabulary. The rooms department of a resort and the rooms department of a city hotel land in the same rows, so a month can be compared with the same month last year without rebuilding the report. What it does not do is tell you whether a number is good. The standard sets the shape of the statement; the comparison is your job.

Why does the USALI report not match your statutory accounts?#

Because the two answer different questions: the statutory books follow the Uniform Chart of Accounts for filing and tax, while the USALI report follows the standard for operating decisions. They are built from the same ledger, arranged differently.

The Uniform Chart of Accounts sits in the annex to Accounting System Implementation General Communiqué No. 1, issued under the Tax Procedure Law and published in the Official Gazette of 26 December 1992 (No. 21447, repeated issue). It binds businesses that keep balance-sheet books, and for calendar-year businesses it has applied since 1 January 1994. That chart is organised by account code and by the nature of the entry. It is not organised around who in the hotel earns the money and who spends it.

USALI is organised exactly that way: departments that sell, then costs that serve the whole property, then the owner's own charges. The bridge between them is a mapping. Each USALI line is fed from named account codes, written down once, and reviewed whenever the chart or the report changes.

The mapping runs one way, from the ledger into the report. Nobody re-posts a statutory entry to make the management report look better. Tax treatment, inflation adjustment and the mapping itself belong to your accountant. The owner's job is to ask for the bridge and be able to read it. Confirm your own filing duties and dates with your accountant or legal adviser.

How does the USALI statement run from revenue to EBITDA?#

In a fixed order. Departmental revenue and its direct costs give departmental profit; undistributed operating expenses are subtracted to give gross operating profit; management fees, non-operating items and fixed charges then lead to EBITDA.

Operated departments are the parts of the hotel that sell: rooms, food and beverage, and other operated departments such as spa, parking or rentals. Each carries its own revenue and its own direct costs, so each shows its own profit. Miscellaneous income collects what belongs to no department, so it is never used to flatter a department's result.

Undistributed operating expenses serve the whole property and are therefore not charged to a department: administration and general, sales and marketing, property operations and maintenance, and utilities. Gross operating profit is what the operation earns before the cost of owning or financing the building. It is the line that judges the management, not the asset. Below it come management fees, non-operating income and expenses, and then fixed charges such as rent, property tax and insurance. EBITDA is the figure an owner or a lender uses to compare properties, because it sits after the owner's own costs rather than before them.

One placement rule keeps the whole statement honest: a cost sits with the person who controls it.

If you want a single revenue-side metric that cuts across departments, TRevPAR and what counts as total revenue explains how to build one from these same lines.

Which lines should an owner read first?#

Start with departmental profit for rooms and for food and beverage, then the four undistributed lines, then every item between gross operating profit and EBITDA. That is the shortest path to the questions worth asking.

Rooms departmental profit: read revenue, cost of sales and payroll as three separate lines, because a single profit figure hides which of the three moved. Food and beverage departmental profit is a line that can be flattered by pushing costs into undistributed accounts, which makes the department look better and the hotel look worse.

Read each undistributed line against budget and against the same month last year. A jump in utilities or sales and marketing while revenue is flat is the question to put to the controller. Then read the gap between gross operating profit and EBITDA: an owner should be able to name every item inside it without help. Consistency matters as much as any single number. If a cost changed department this month and not last month, every comparison in the pack is broken until it is fixed. Ask for the same layout every month. A report whose shape changes hides a story that is changing.

For the step from departmental profit to a per-room figure, GOPPAR and profit per available room shows how to divide it and when the result misleads.

Why does the all-inclusive section in the 12th edition matter in Türkiye?#

Because an all-inclusive package sells one price for several departments at once, and the new section gives a common way to report how that price and its costs are split. Without a split, departmental profit means nothing.

The 12th Revised Edition, with an adoption date of 1 January 2026, adds a section on reporting revenue and expenses for all-inclusive hotels (AHLA, 11 July 2024 (opens in a new tab)). The underlying problem is simple: one package price covers rooms, food, beverages and often activities, so the statement has to decide how much revenue each department is credited with.

Two decisions belong to the owner and must be written down: the rule that allocates package revenue across departments, and the rule that places the direct costs of the package. The allocation rule must be stable. Changing it mid-year breaks every comparison the statement exists to support.

Allocating a package price for tax is a separate question from allocating it for management. Do not assume the two rules are the same; ask your accountant how each applies to your contracts. The same discipline applies outside all-inclusive: board packages, spa packages and event packages all need a stated split before departmental profit can be read. The economics behind the price you set for a package are covered in all-inclusive hotel economics and cost per guest night.

How do you build a one-page monthly owner report?#

Take six to eight USALI lines, show each against budget and against last year, and add one sentence of cause for every line that moved. Everything else stays in the controller's file.

The lines: rooms departmental profit, food and beverage departmental profit, total undistributed operating expenses, gross operating profit and EBITDA, plus two or three drivers such as occupancy, ADR and RevPAR that explain them. For example, and this is an illustration rather than a benchmark: a page showing those lines with actual, budget and last year in three columns, and a commentary column beside them, is enough for a monthly owner meeting.

A variance needs a cause, not a colour. "Utilities up because pool heating ran longer" is useful; a red cell is not. Keep the mapping document and the report template together, so a new controller can reproduce last month's page exactly. Send the page before the meeting, not during it. The meeting is for decisions, not for reading. If a line cannot be explained in one sentence, that is the finding, and it goes at the top of the page.

How to read the variances once the page exists is its own skill: budget versus actual and reading the monthly variance walks through the questions in order.

What to do next#

The next step is a single meeting with your accountant: agree which account codes feed which USALI lines, write the mapping down, and fix the one-page owner report that will be produced from it every month. Everything in this article depends on that bridge existing, because the statement only becomes useful when the same lines arrive in the same order, month after month, with a cause attached to every number that moved.