Hospitality ERP Software | Best ERP for Hotels & Restaurants 2026

The Hospitality ERP Buyer's Guide

Hospitality businesses operate in a way that most ERP vendors do not understand. A hotel does not work like a manufacturer. A restaurant chain does not work like a distribution company. A resort group with rooms, restaurants, spa, golf, and retail does not work like anything else at all.

Your operational reality is multiple revenue streams running simultaneously across multiple properties, each with its own cost structure, staffing model, and seasonal pattern. Rooms revenue follows one logic. Food and beverage follows another. Events and banqueting follow a third. Spa and retail follow a fourth. And all of these must roll up into consolidated financial statements that your ownership group, management company, or investors can use to evaluate performance.

The complication is that hospitality runs on specialized systems. Your property management system handles reservations and room assignments. Your point-of-sale system handles restaurant and bar transactions. Your booking engine handles online reservations. Your revenue management system optimizes pricing. Your housekeeping system manages room status. Your labor scheduling system manages shifts. None of these were designed to talk to each other, and none of them are your accounting system.

ERP in hospitality is fundamentally about integration: connecting these specialized systems to a financial and operational backbone that gives you a single version of the truth. This guide covers the ERP landscape specifically for hotels, restaurants, and hospitality groups. We explain the unique requirements, compare vendors for different scales of operation, and help you understand what questions to ask.

Why Hospitality Businesses Have Unique ERP Needs

The challenges below are not theoretical. They are the daily reality of hospitality finance and operations teams, and they are precisely where generic ERP systems fail.

Fragmented Systems That Do Not Talk to Each Other

The average mid-size hotel runs 8-15 distinct software systems: PMS, POS, booking engine, channel manager, revenue management system, housekeeping, engineering/maintenance, spa management, golf management, labor scheduling, payroll, accounting, and business intelligence. Each system generates data. Very little of that data flows automatically into your financial system.

The result is a finance team that spends days after month-end manually reconciling data from multiple sources. The night auditor exports PMS revenue. Someone pulls POS data. Another person consolidates banquet event orders. Yet another reconciles OTA commissions. This manual assembly is slow, error-prone, and unsustainable as you add properties.

Multi-Property Financial Consolidation

If you operate more than one property, consolidation is a constant headache. Each property may have a different PMS, different POS systems, different chart of accounts structures, and different reporting formats. Rolling up a portfolio of 5, 20, or 100 properties into consolidated financial statements, management company reports, and owner statements is enormously manual without the right ERP.

The challenge intensifies when you manage properties for different owners. Each owner wants their property P&L in a specific format. Management fees must be calculated per the management agreement. Capital expenditure must be tracked against FF&E reserves. CapEx reimbursement workflows differ by owner. This multi-stakeholder reporting requirement is unique to hospitality.

Labor Cost Management

Labor is your largest controllable expense, typically 25-35% of revenue for hotels and 30-40% for restaurants. Managing labor cost requires real-time visibility into hours worked versus hours scheduled, overtime exposure, labor cost per occupied room (or per cover in restaurants), and productivity metrics by department.

Most hospitality companies manage labor scheduling in one system, track time and attendance in another, process payroll in a third, and report labor costs in a fourth. The lag between scheduling decisions and financial impact visibility can be days or weeks. By the time you see the labor cost variance, it is too late to act on it.

Food and Beverage Cost Control

F&B operations are uniquely challenging because of the combination of perishability, waste, theft risk, and menu complexity. Effective F&B cost control requires recipe costing (with real-time ingredient price updates), theoretical versus actual cost variance analysis, waste tracking, inventory management with physical counts, and vendor price monitoring.

Most restaurants and hotel F&B operations manage this through a combination of inventory management software, POS data, and spreadsheets. The integration between what was purchased, what was used in recipes, what was sold, and what was wasted is rarely automated. Managers make purchasing decisions based on experience rather than data, and food cost percentages drift upward slowly until someone notices.

Revenue Management Across Channels

Hotels sell inventory through dozens of channels: direct website, brand website, OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb), GDS (for corporate and travel agent bookings), group and corporate direct, and wholesalers. Each channel has different commission structures, rate parity requirements, and booking patterns.

Understanding true channel profitability requires accounting for commission costs, loyalty point obligations, channel-specific marketing costs, and the cancellation rates associated with each channel. This analysis lives in spreadsheets at most hotel companies because the PMS, channel manager, and accounting system are not connected in a way that enables it automatically.

Tip and Gratuity Compliance

Tip management in hospitality is a compliance minefield. FLSA tip credit rules, tip pooling regulations (which vary by state and municipality), service charge distribution, automatic gratuity policies, tip reporting for tax purposes, and the distinction between tips and service charges all create complexity that generic payroll systems handle poorly. A tip calculation error across hundreds of employees and thousands of transactions can create significant legal exposure.

Franchise and Management Company Reporting

Hospitality operates through a complex web of ownership and management structures. A management company may operate 30 hotels for 15 different ownership groups, with each hotel operating under a brand franchise agreement. The reporting requirements are layered: the brand requires specific reporting formats, the ownership group requires financial statements per the management agreement, the management company needs portfolio-level analytics, and lenders require covenant compliance reporting.

Each layer has different reporting requirements, different chart of accounts preferences, and different timelines. Satisfying all of these from a single system requires an ERP that understands multi-entity, multi-stakeholder reporting natively.

Seasonal Staffing and Cash Flow

Hospitality is one of the most seasonal industries. A ski resort hotel may do 60% of its revenue in four months. A beach resort reverses the pattern. Restaurants in tourist areas face similar swings. This seasonality creates cash flow management challenges that require careful forecasting and the ability to see forward-looking financial position alongside historical results.

Seasonal staffing adds complexity. Onboarding 100 seasonal workers in a two-week period, managing their training, scheduling, and eventual offboarding, requires systems that can handle rapid headcount changes without administrative chaos.

Guest Data Scattered Across Systems

Your guest's data lives in fragments across your PMS (stay history), POS (dining preferences), spa system (treatment history), loyalty platform (points and tier status), CRM (marketing preferences), and booking engine (booking patterns). No single system has a complete picture of the guest, which means personalization efforts are limited and guest lifetime value analysis is nearly impossible without significant data integration work.

Best ERP Systems for SMB Hospitality (Independent Hotels and Small Chains)

If you operate 1-10 properties or a restaurant group with under $100M in revenue, these vendors offer the right balance of functionality, cost, and implementation complexity for your scale.

Sage Intacct

Best for: Restaurant groups and hotel management companies that need best-in-class multi-entity financial management

Sage Intacct has become the ERP of choice for many restaurant chains and hotel management companies, and the reason is its multi-dimensional general ledger and multi-entity consolidation capabilities. When you manage 15 restaurants or 8 hotels, each as a separate legal entity with different ownership structures, Intacct handles the consolidation, intercompany transactions, and per-entity reporting better than any competitor at this price point.

The dimensional reporting is transformative for hospitality. Tag every transaction with property, department, revenue center, and management company dimensions. Run a P&L by property, by department within a property, by revenue center within a department, or consolidated across your entire portfolio, all without restructuring your chart of accounts. Compare food cost percentages across restaurants, labor cost per occupied room across hotels, or GOP margins across properties with a few clicks.

Intacct also handles the multi-stakeholder reporting challenge well. Produce owner financial packages, management company P&Ls, and brand-required reports from the same underlying data. Automated management fee calculations, FF&E reserve tracking, and capital expenditure workflows are available through configuration or marketplace apps.

The limitation is that Intacct is a financial management platform, not a hospitality operations system. You still need your PMS, POS, and labor management systems. Integration between these operational systems and Intacct is essential, and the quality of those integrations varies. The most common PMS integrations (Opera, Mews, Cloudbeds) are available through partners or middleware, but they require setup and ongoing maintenance.

Typical all-in cost: $30,000-$120,000 first year. Ongoing $25,000-$80,000/year.

Oracle NetSuite

Best for: Growing hospitality companies that want a single integrated platform with hospitality-specific extensions

NetSuite's strength for hospitality is its SuiteApp ecosystem, which includes hospitality-specific extensions for hotel and restaurant operations. The core platform provides financial management, inventory, procurement, and fixed asset management. Hospitality SuiteApps add property-level reporting, F&B inventory management, and PMS integration capabilities.

For hospitality companies that are growing rapidly (opening new locations, acquiring properties), NetSuite's scalability is an advantage. You can implement NetSuite for a 3-property hotel group and still be running it at 30 properties. The multi-subsidiary management handles different ownership structures, and the SuiteAnalytics reporting provides portfolio-level dashboards.

The e-commerce and CRM capabilities are useful for hospitality companies building direct booking channels or managing group sales pipelines. Having inventory management, procurement, and financials on a single platform reduces the integration burden compared to best-of-breed approaches.

The downsides are cost and the fact that the hospitality SuiteApps are developed by third parties, not Oracle. The quality and support for these extensions varies. NetSuite is also more expensive than Intacct for comparable functionality, and hospitality companies with tight margins feel this acutely.

Typical all-in cost: $50,000-$180,000 first year. Ongoing $35,000-$100,000/year.

SAP Business ByDesign

Best for: International hotel groups that need multi-country compliance and multi-currency operations out of the box

If your hotel group operates across multiple countries (common for European hospitality companies or international management companies), ByDesign's built-in country localizations are valuable. VAT handling for EU countries, country-specific statutory reporting, multi-currency transactions, and intercompany accounting across jurisdictions are all handled natively.

The procurement and inventory modules are solid for managing F&B purchasing across properties. The project management module can track renovation and capital expenditure projects. The HR module handles basic workforce management, though you will likely still need specialized hospitality labor scheduling.

The challenge is that ByDesign has a smaller hospitality-specific partner ecosystem than Intacct or NetSuite, particularly in North America. PMS and POS integrations may require custom development. The user interface is functional but not as modern as competitors. Implementation requires a certified partner, and finding one with hospitality experience may limit your options.

Typical all-in cost: $40,000-$150,000 first year. Ongoing $30,000-$90,000/year.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Best for: Hospitality companies in the Microsoft ecosystem that want extensibility through ISV solutions

Business Central's advantage for hospitality is its ISV (independent software vendor) ecosystem. Several hospitality-specific ISVs have built solutions on top of Business Central that add hotel accounting, restaurant management, and property management capabilities. If you find an ISV solution that fits your specific hospitality sub-segment, Business Central plus the ISV layer can be powerful.

The Microsoft ecosystem integration matters for hospitality groups that use Office 365, Teams, and Power BI. Property managers can access financial data in Teams. Power BI dashboards can pull from Business Central for real-time property performance monitoring. Power Automate can create workflows for capital expenditure approvals or vendor onboarding.

The risk is dependency on the ISV. If the ISV is small, their long-term viability and support quality are concerns. Business Central's base functionality does not include hospitality-specific features, so without the right ISV layer, it is a generic ERP that requires significant customization to serve hospitality.

Typical all-in cost: $30,000-$120,000 first year (including ISV solutions). Ongoing $20,000-$75,000/year.

Acumatica

Best for: Multi-property hospitality operators that need unlimited user access without per-user fees

Acumatica's unlimited-users model is particularly attractive in hospitality, where many employees (front desk, restaurant managers, department heads, maintenance staff, controllers) need some level of system access. In a hotel with 200 employees, even if only 30 need regular ERP access, per-user pricing adds up quickly with other vendors.

The construction edition is relevant for hospitality companies that do significant renovation or new-build projects. Project accounting, subcontractor management, and capital expenditure tracking are strong. The distribution and inventory modules handle F&B purchasing and supply management.

The limitation is that Acumatica has fewer pre-built hospitality integrations than NetSuite or Business Central. PMS and POS integrations will likely require middleware or custom development. The hospitality-specific partner ecosystem is smaller, so finding an implementation partner with deep hotel or restaurant experience may be challenging.

Typical all-in cost: $35,000-$130,000 first year. Ongoing $25,000-$85,000/year.

Aptech PVNG

Best for: Hotels and hospitality companies that want a purpose-built hospitality accounting system

Aptech PVNG is the specialist option on this list. It is built specifically for hotel accounting and has been a mainstay of the hospitality industry for decades. PVNG understands hotel chart of accounts structures (following the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry, or USALI), integrates with major PMS platforms (particularly Opera), and produces the reports that hotel owners, management companies, and brands expect.

The strength is deep hospitality domain knowledge. Daily revenue posting from PMS, city ledger management, travel agent commission tracking, franchise fee calculations, management fee calculations, and owner statement generation are core capabilities, not afterthoughts. If you are a hotel management company and your primary need is hotel-specific accounting with industry-standard reporting, PVNG is purpose-built for exactly this.

The limitation is that PVNG is a hospitality accounting system, not a modern cloud ERP platform. It lacks the broader functionality (CRM, advanced procurement, business intelligence) that general-purpose ERPs provide. The technology stack is older. If you need an ERP that also handles restaurant group operations, corporate overhead, or non-hospitality business units, PVNG is too narrow.

Typical all-in cost: $20,000-$80,000 first year. Ongoing $15,000-$50,000/year.

Best ERP Systems for Enterprise Hospitality (Major Chains and Hotel Groups)

At this scale (50+ properties, $500M+ revenue, or major brand operations), you need enterprise-grade systems with deep hospitality integration, global capabilities, and the scale to handle thousands of users and millions of transactions.

Oracle Hospitality (OPERA) + Oracle ERP Cloud

Best for: Large hotel companies that want end-to-end Oracle integration from PMS through financials

Oracle dominates enterprise hospitality technology through its OPERA PMS platform. For companies already running OPERA, adding Oracle ERP Cloud creates an integrated stack from property operations through financial management. The integration between OPERA and Oracle Financials eliminates much of the manual reconciliation that plagues hotel accounting.

Oracle ERP Cloud provides enterprise financial management, procurement, project management, and risk management. The Hospitality Reporting and Analytics (ORAS) platform connects operational data from OPERA with financial data from ERP for comprehensive performance analysis. For large hotel companies, the depth of Oracle's hospitality technology stack is unmatched.

The cost and complexity are significant. Oracle enterprise implementations are measured in years and millions of dollars. The technology is powerful but requires dedicated IT and finance teams to manage and optimize. This is a solution for major hotel companies with the resources to support it, not for growing chains.

Typical all-in cost: $1M-$10M+ first year. Ongoing $500,000-$3M+/year.

SAP S/4HANA

Best for: Global hospitality companies with complex multi-country operations and supply chain needs

SAP S/4HANA is used by several of the world's largest hospitality companies (Marriott and Hilton among them) for enterprise financial management and global operations. The strength is depth: multi-country compliance across dozens of jurisdictions, complex procurement and supply chain management (critical for large chains with centralized purchasing), and advanced analytics through SAP Analytics Cloud.

For hospitality companies that also have significant non-hotel operations (cruise lines, theme parks, managed food service), S/4HANA's breadth across industries is an advantage. The real estate management module handles property portfolio management. The project management module tracks major capital expenditure programs.

The well-documented challenges apply: long implementation timelines (18-36+ months), high cost ($3M-$15M+ for enterprise deployments), dependence on specialized consultants, and a user experience that is improving but still lags behind modern cloud platforms.

Typical all-in cost: $3M-$15M+ first year. Ongoing $1M-$5M+/year.

Workday

Best for: Large hospitality companies that prioritize workforce management alongside financial management

Workday's value proposition for hospitality is combining financial management with best-in-class HCM on a single platform. In an industry where labor is the largest cost and workforce management is a strategic challenge, having headcount planning, scheduling, compensation, benefits, and financial reporting on the same platform is powerful.

Workday Adaptive Planning connects workforce plans to financial forecasts, enabling scenario analysis that links staffing models to profitability projections. For a hotel company evaluating whether to add a restaurant or adjust staffing levels by season, this connection between workforce and financial planning is valuable.

The limitation is that Workday has less hospitality-specific functionality than Oracle or SAP. PMS integration is not a core Workday capability. Hospitality-specific reporting formats (USALI) require configuration. The cost is enterprise-level, and the implementation timeline is typically 12-18 months.

Typical all-in cost: $1M-$5M+ first year. Ongoing $500,000-$2M+/year.

Infor Hospitality

Best for: Hotel companies that want purpose-built hospitality ERP with deep PMS integration

Infor has built a dedicated hospitality business unit with solutions designed specifically for the industry. Infor HMS (Hospitality Management Solution) integrates with Infor's broader ERP platform (Infor CloudSuite) to provide a purpose-built hospitality stack. Revenue management (Infor EzRMS), labor management, procurement, and analytics are all designed with hospitality use cases in mind.

The advantage is domain specificity at enterprise scale. Infor understands USALI, hotel procurement patterns, F&B cost management, and the operational rhythm of hospitality in a way that generic enterprise ERP vendors do not. The Birst analytics platform provides hospitality-specific dashboards and benchmarking.

The challenge is that Infor's market position in hospitality has evolved over the years, and the transition from on-premise to cloud has been slower than some competitors. Evaluate the current state of their cloud offerings carefully and ensure the specific products being proposed are actively developed and supported.

Typical all-in cost: $500,000-$5M+ first year. Ongoing $300,000-$2M+/year.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance with Hospitality Accelerators

Best for: Large hospitality companies in the Microsoft ecosystem that want Azure-native analytics and AI capabilities

Dynamics 365 Finance at the enterprise level provides core financial management with the ability to layer on hospitality-specific functionality through accelerators and ISV solutions. For hospitality companies investing heavily in Microsoft Azure for data analytics, Power BI for reporting, and AI capabilities for demand forecasting, Dynamics 365 provides the native integration point.

The advantage is the broader Microsoft ecosystem: Azure IoT for smart building management, Power BI for property performance dashboards, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights for guest data unification, and Azure Machine Learning for demand forecasting. For hospitality companies that see technology as a competitive advantage and want to build on a broad platform, Microsoft offers the deepest toolbox.

The limitation is that the hospitality-specific layer is thinner than Oracle or Infor. You are building a hospitality solution on a general-purpose platform rather than buying a purpose-built one. This requires more integration work and more hospitality-specific configuration.

Typical all-in cost: $500,000-$3M+ first year. Ongoing $300,000-$1.5M+/year.

Essential ERP Capabilities for Hospitality

The Critical Distinction: Hospitality ERP vs. PMS

Before evaluating specific capabilities, it is essential to understand that ERP and PMS are complementary systems, not competing ones. Your PMS (Opera, Mews, Cloudbeds, Maestro, or others) manages the operational side of hotel operations: reservations, guest check-in/check-out, room assignments, housekeeping status, and rate management. Your ERP manages the financial side: general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, financial reporting, procurement, and consolidation.

The two systems must integrate tightly. Daily revenue postings from PMS to ERP, city ledger transfers, credit card settlement reconciliation, and advance deposit accounting all require a reliable data bridge between your operational and financial systems. When evaluating ERP, the quality of PMS integration is one of the most important criteria.

Must-Have Capabilities

• PMS and POS integration: Automated daily revenue posting, city ledger management, and POS transaction aggregation. This integration eliminates the most time-consuming manual process in hotel accounting.
• Multi-property financial consolidation: Automated consolidation across properties, management companies, and ownership groups. Per-property P&L, consolidated portfolio reporting, and elimination of intercompany transactions.
• USALI-compliant reporting: The Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry is the standard for hotel financial reporting. Your ERP must support USALI chart of accounts structures and produce USALI-format departmental P&Ls.
• Labor scheduling and cost management: Integration with labor scheduling systems. Real-time labor cost tracking against budget. Overtime alerts. Productivity metrics (labor cost per occupied room, labor cost per cover).
• F&B cost control and recipe costing: Track food and beverage costs at the recipe level. Compare theoretical costs (based on sales mix and recipes) to actual costs (based on purchases and inventory). Identify variances that indicate waste, theft, or pricing problems.
• Multi-departmental P&L reporting: Rooms, F&B, spa, golf, retail, events, and other departments each need their own P&L. Department heads need timely access to their numbers.

Important Capabilities

• Revenue management integration: Connect your revenue management system (IDeaS, Duetto, Atomize) to your ERP for profitability analysis that includes the financial impact of pricing decisions.
• Tip and gratuity compliance (FLSA): Automated tip pooling calculations, service charge distribution, tip credit tracking, and tip reporting for payroll and tax purposes. State-specific rule handling.
• Franchise and management fee calculations: Automated calculation of franchise fees (typically a percentage of rooms revenue), management fees (typically a percentage of revenue or a base plus incentive structure), and other contractual charges.
• Capital expenditure and FF&E tracking: Track capital expenditure against FF&E reserves. Manage renovation project budgets. Fixed asset management with depreciation for furniture, fixtures, and equipment.
• Guest data aggregation: While not a traditional ERP function, the ability to aggregate guest spending and preference data from PMS, POS, spa, and other systems into a unified profile supports personalization and lifetime value analysis.

Nice-to-Have Capabilities

• Procurement and supplier management: Centralized purchasing for multi-property operations. Vendor performance tracking. Contract management for major suppliers (food distributors, linen services, amenities).
• Energy and utility cost management: Track utility costs by property and by area. Identify anomalies. Benchmark across properties. Relevant for hotel companies with sustainability targets.
• Owner statement automation: Automated generation of owner financial packages per the management agreement. Includes P&L, balance sheet, capital expenditure report, and management fee calculation.

What Will This Cost? Honest Pricing for Hospitality

SMB Hospitality (1-10 Properties or Small Restaurant Groups)

ERP software: $15,000-$80,000 per year depending on vendor, modules, and property count.

Implementation: $20,000-$150,000 for standard deployment including PMS/POS integration, data migration, chart of accounts setup, and training. The PMS integration alone can represent 20-30% of implementation cost.

Ongoing costs: $20,000-$100,000 per year including software subscriptions, support, and integration maintenance.

Total first-year investment: $35,000-$230,000 depending on complexity.

Enterprise Hospitality (50+ Properties or Major Chains)

ERP software: $200,000-$2M+ per year.

Implementation: $500,000-$10M+ for enterprise deployments with multi-property rollout, complex integrations, global compliance configuration, and organizational change management. Rollout to 50+ properties typically takes 18-36 months.

Ongoing costs: $300,000-$3M+ per year including software, integration maintenance, managed services, and continuous improvement.

Total first-year investment: $1M-$12M+ depending on scope and vendor.

Hospitality-Specific Cost Drivers

• PMS integration complexity: The integration between your PMS and ERP is the most critical and most complex. Opera integrations are well-established but still require significant configuration. Less common PMS platforms may require custom integration development.
• Number of properties: Many ERP vendors price by entity or property, so your cost scales linearly with portfolio size. Negotiate volume pricing for multi-property deployments.
• Multi-brand or multi-owner structures: Each brand and each ownership group may have different reporting requirements, chart of accounts preferences, and management agreement terms. This complexity adds implementation time and cost.
• F&B inventory and recipe management: If you need detailed F&B cost management, you may need a specialized F&B inventory system (MarketMan, BlueCart, Craftable) integrated with your ERP, adding integration cost.
• Payroll and tip management complexity: Hospitality payroll is complex (tips, multiple pay rates, shift differentials, seasonal workers). Integration with a hospitality-savvy payroll system adds cost but is essential.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a separate ERP if I already have a PMS?

Yes. Your PMS manages hotel operations (reservations, front desk, housekeeping). Your ERP manages financial operations (general ledger, AP, AR, financial reporting, procurement). They serve different purposes and different users. Your front desk team uses the PMS. Your accounting team uses the ERP. The two systems must integrate so that revenue, receivables, and other financial data flows from PMS to ERP automatically, but they do not replace each other. Attempting to use a PMS as your accounting system (or vice versa) leads to manual workarounds and inadequate reporting.

Should a restaurant group use the same ERP as a hotel group?

The requirements overlap significantly (multi-unit financial consolidation, F&B cost control, labor management), but there are differences. Restaurant groups typically need deeper POS integration and menu engineering capabilities. Hotel groups need PMS integration, rooms revenue management, and USALI-compliant reporting. Vendors like Sage Intacct and NetSuite serve both segments well. If you operate both hotels and restaurants (as many hospitality companies do), choose an ERP that handles both and implement PMS and POS integrations specific to each property type.

How important is USALI compliance in my ERP?

If you operate hotels, USALI compliance is effectively mandatory. Hotel owners, management companies, brands, and lenders all expect financial reporting that follows USALI standards. Your ERP must support the USALI chart of accounts structure and produce departmental P&Ls in the expected format. This is not just a reporting preference. Management agreements often specify USALI as the required reporting standard. If your ERP cannot produce USALI-compliant reports natively, you will spend significant time reformatting output in spreadsheets.

How do I handle multi-property consolidation when each property has a different PMS?

This is a common challenge, especially for management companies that inherit different PMS platforms through management contracts. The ERP must be able to receive data from multiple PMS platforms and standardize it into a consistent financial format. Middleware platforms (like Hapi or Otelier, formerly MyDigitalOffice) can normalize data from different PMS platforms before it reaches your ERP. Alternatively, build standardized PMS-to-ERP integration templates that map each PMS's data format to your ERP's chart of accounts.

What is the biggest mistake hospitality companies make when selecting ERP?

Choosing an ERP without evaluating PMS integration quality first. Many hospitality companies select an ERP based on its financial capabilities and then discover that integrating with their PMS is difficult, expensive, or unreliable. The PMS integration should be a primary evaluation criterion, not an afterthought. Ask the vendor to demonstrate the PMS integration with your specific PMS platform, not just the one they integrate with most easily. Ask for references from companies running the same PMS-ERP combination.

Can I use a cloud ERP if my PMS is on-premise?

Yes, and this is increasingly common. Many hotels still run on-premise PMS (particularly Opera on-premise) but implement cloud ERP for financial management. The integration between on-premise PMS and cloud ERP typically runs through middleware or scheduled data transfers. Real-time integration is possible but adds complexity. As the hospitality industry migrates toward cloud PMS (Opera Cloud, Mews, Cloudbeds), this hybrid architecture will become less common, but for now it is a practical and well-supported approach.

How do I manage the transition when implementing ERP across multiple properties?

Roll out by property or by cluster, not all at once. A typical approach is to implement at a pilot property first (choose one that is representative but not your most complex or highest-revenue property), refine the configuration and integrations based on real-world experience, and then roll out to additional properties in waves of 3-5 at a time. Each wave benefits from lessons learned in previous waves. Budget 2-4 weeks per wave for a smooth rollout. Full portfolio rollout for 20+ properties typically takes 6-18 months after the pilot.

Should I integrate my labor scheduling system with my ERP?

Yes, if labor cost management is a priority (and in hospitality, it should be). The integration enables you to see scheduled labor cost against budget in near-real-time, compare actual hours worked to scheduled hours, and produce accurate labor cost per occupied room or per cover metrics without manual data compilation. The most common hospitality labor platforms (HotSchedules/Fourth, UKG, ADP, Unifocus) have integration capabilities with major ERP systems. The integration payback period is typically very short because labor cost is such a large percentage of revenue.

How does ERP help with F&B cost control?

ERP provides the financial framework for F&B cost management, but deep F&B cost control typically requires a specialized tool integrated with ERP. The ERP handles purchasing, accounts payable, and cost reporting. A specialized F&B management system handles recipe costing, theoretical cost calculations, menu engineering, and waste tracking. When integrated, the combination gives you the ability to compare what your F&B costs should be (based on what you sold and your recipes) to what they actually were (based on what you purchased and your inventory changes). The variance between theoretical and actual cost is where you find waste, theft, and pricing problems.

What about franchise reporting requirements?

Major hotel brands (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, and others) have specific financial reporting requirements for franchised properties. Your ERP must be able to produce reports in the brand's required format, calculate franchise fees per the franchise agreement, and often submit data to brand systems electronically. When evaluating ERP, verify that it can produce the specific reports your brand requires. Ask for references from properties operating under the same brand. Some brands have preferred or certified ERP vendors that may simplify compliance.

Is it worth investing in ERP for a single independent hotel?

For a single independent hotel with a simple operation (rooms and basic F&B), a dedicated hotel accounting system like Aptech PVNG or even QuickBooks with a good PMS integration may be sufficient and more cost-effective than a full ERP platform. ERP becomes clearly justified when you have multiple properties, complex ownership structures, significant F&B operations, or a need for advanced financial reporting beyond basic hotel accounting. If you plan to add properties in the next 2-3 years, implementing ERP now avoids a painful migration later.

Start With a Clear Requirements List

Hospitality ERP selection requires balancing general financial management capabilities with industry-specific requirements that generic ERP evaluation frameworks miss. PMS integration, USALI compliance, multi-property consolidation, and labor cost management are not standard evaluation criteria, but they are make-or-break for hospitality.

Our free ERP requirements tool helps you define and prioritize the capabilities that matter for your hospitality business. Start with the hospitality-specific requirements and then layer in the standard financial and operational capabilities.

Build Your ERP Requirements List