Running several hotels: separate books, one picture
How an owner of several hotels or restaurants keeps each company's books apart in Achekam and still builds a monthly view of how the whole group is doing.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Hospitality businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Hospitality owners rarely stop at one property. A lodge in the bush is followed by a boutique hotel in town, a restaurant opens in the hotel's ground floor, and before long there are three or four companies, often with a property-owning company behind them. Each one has its own bank account, its own VAT registration and its own staff. The owner, meanwhile, wants one answer on a Monday morning: is the group making money?
The temptation is to run everything through one set of books with a department for each property. It is simpler for a month and painful for years, because the tax authority, the bank and any future buyer see companies, not departments. This article explains how to keep each company's books separate in Achekam and still see the group as a whole, for owners in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
One workspace per company
In Achekam, a business signs up as a business, chooses its country and gets its own workspace, its own books and its own web address on the Achekam domain, with the person who signs up as administrator. For a group, that means one workspace for each company that is registered separately: the lodge, the town hotel, the restaurant company and the property company.
Separate workspaces give each company the things it genuinely needs to keep apart:
- its own ledger and chart of accounts;
- its own customers, suppliers and invoice numbering;
- its own bank reconciliations;
- its own payroll, where its staff are employed by that company.
A useful naming habit is to use each company's registered name in full, followed by the property's trading name in brackets, so nobody posts a supplier bill for the lodge into the restaurant company by mistake.
Switching books safely
Owners and group accountants work across all the workspaces. Someone who works in several workspaces switches books from the header, and a coloured bar shows whose books are open. The bar is the most important safeguard in a group: before capturing anything, glance at it.
Errors still happen, typically when one supplier serves every property. The linen hire company sends one statement covering three sites, or the group buys glassware in bulk for two restaurants. Split such bills at source: ask the supplier to invoice each company separately, or record the bill in the company that ordered it and recharge the others with their own invoices. Each company's books then reflect only what it owes and what it is owed.
No consolidation engine: what that means
Achekam has no engine that consolidates the accounts of a group of businesses. It does not add the companies together, remove the transactions between them, or produce group financial statements.
That matters most where companies trade with each other, which in hospitality is common:
| Transaction between companies | Shows in one company as | Shows in the other as |
|---|---|---|
| Management fee charged by the holding company | Income | An expense |
| Central kitchen supplying the hotel restaurant | Sales | Cost of food |
| Rent paid to the property company | Rental income | Rent expense |
| A loan from one company to another | A receivable | A liability |
Added together without adjustment, these items inflate both income and costs, and a loan between two companies looks like money owed by outsiders. A consolidation removes them. Until then, keep both sides identical: same amount, same date, same description, so they can be matched later.
Putting the management accounts side by side
Each workspace produces its own management accounts: an income statement for a chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, both added up from that company's journals and exportable as PDF or CSV.
A simple monthly group pack:
- Close each company's month and reconcile its bank accounts.
- Export each company's income statement and balance sheet as CSV for the same period.
- Put them side by side in one spreadsheet, a column per company.
- Mark the transactions between companies and show the total with and without them.
- Note anything unusual property by property: occupancy dropped, food cost rose, a large repair.
Two details to watch. The year-to-date preset starts on 1 January, not on the business's own year start, so a group with a February or June year end should choose its dates by hand. And for Nigerian and Kenyan groups, the ledger screens currently show every amount in rand and the chart of accounts is stored in ZAR, so label your spreadsheet in your own currency and check exported figures carefully.
For a deeper look at reading management accounts as an owner, see management accounts for a partnership; for a group that runs several agencies rather than properties, books for several agency entities covers similar ground.
When to ask the accountant to consolidate
A side-by-side spreadsheet is enough for running the business. It is not enough when someone needs group financial statements, for example:
- a bank lending to the group against all the properties;
- a buyer or investor looking at the whole business;
- a holding company that must present consolidated accounts;
- a year-end where the owner wants one audited picture.
Whether a parent must consolidate depends on control, and the IFRS Foundation's summary of IFRS 10 Consolidated Financial Statements explains the control principle that decides when a parent must prepare consolidated financial statements for the entities it controls.
Each company can appoint its accounting firm by the firm's Achekam address or firm code, with an access level, and the firm accepts or declines. An appointed firm works directly in that company's ledger, with no copy made. Appoint the same firm to every workspace in the group, so the people preparing the consolidation see each set of books as you do.
Getting started
List every company in the group, confirm which ones need their own workspace, and set them up one at a time with the same chart of accounts structure. Agree with your accountant how transactions between companies will be described, then build the first monthly group pack from real figures before the next busy season arrives.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
