Hotel Chart of Accounts: Room Revenue, F&B Costs, and OTA Commissions

If you run a hotel, motel, bed & breakfast, or small resort, your chart of accounts is probably lying to you about which part of the property actually makes money. A generic QuickBooks setup dumps room revenue, restaurant revenue, and event space rental into one "Sales" line, and lets every online travel agency commission land in a single vague "fees" account. You can see that the property made money overall. You can't see whether it was rooms carrying food & beverage, or the other way around.

This guide walks through setting up a hotel chart of accounts that reflects how a property actually operates — department by department, channel by channel.

Why a Generic Chart of Accounts Fails a Hotel

A hotel isn't one business. It's several small businesses sharing a building: the rooms department, food & beverage, and often a handful of other operated departments — parking, spa, meeting space. The hospitality industry has long used its own standardized reporting framework for exactly this reason, built around grouping revenue and direct costs by operating department so each one can be judged on its own profitability. This guide doesn't attempt to reproduce that framework line by line, but the accounts below follow the same departmental logic, sized to fit inside a standard QuickBooks chart of accounts.

Here's what that means you need to see, and what a generic chart of accounts hides:

• Room revenue vs. food & beverage vs. other operated departments — each compared against its own direct costs, not one blended margin
• What a booking channel actually nets you — the commission an online travel agency (OTA) takes is a real operating cost, not a rounding error inside "merchant fees"
• Deposits and advance bookings held as a liability — money collected before a guest checks in isn't revenue yet under GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles); it's cash you're holding on the guest's behalf
• Occupancy tax collected on behalf of the local government — it passes through your books, it isn't yours to report as income
• Housekeeping labor and linen costs that scale with occupancy — not buried inside a single payroll or supplies line

Direct Costs by Department (COGS)

Instead of one "Cost of Goods Sold" line, a hotel needs its direct costs split by the department that drove them:

Once these are split out, the rooms department P&L is Room Revenue minus Direct Housekeeping Labor, Room Service Supplies, and Laundry/Linen costs — and it's separate from the F&B department P&L, which is Food & Beverage Revenue minus Food & Beverage Cost and Breakfast Buffet Cost. If the F&B outlet is losing money on every covered plate, a blended COGS line will never show you that. A departmental one will.

Revenue That Shouldn't All Live in One Line

Room night sales, restaurant sales, and event space rental behave completely differently — different seasonality, different margins, different sensitivity to occupancy. Keep them apart:

• Room Revenue (4000) — guest room rental revenue, the core of a rooms department
• Food & Beverage Revenue (4100) — restaurant, bar, and room service revenue
• Event & Conference Revenue (4200) — meeting room, banquet, and event space rental
• Resort Fees (4300) — mandatory resort or facility fees
• Parking Revenue (4400) — parking fees and valet services
• Amenity Revenue (4500) — spa, fitness, pool, and other amenity fees

Two smaller income accounts are worth keeping separate rather than folding into room revenue: Cancellation Fees (4710) and Late Checkout Fees (4720). They're real income, but they're not room rate — mixing them in inflates your average daily rate (ADR) with revenue that has nothing to do with a room actually being sold.

OTA Commissions, Deposits, and Occupancy Tax

This is where most hotel books fall apart, because these liabilities and expenses are specific to how lodging actually gets booked and paid for:

• OTA Payables (2010) — amounts owed to online travel agencies, tracked separately from your regular trade payables
• OTA Commissions (6510) — the commission expense itself, booked against the full room rate rather than netted out of revenue
• Customer Deposits (2240) — guest deposits for future stays, a liability until the stay happens
• Advance Bookings (2250) — prepaid reservations for future dates
• Occupancy Tax Payable (2230) — hotel occupancy tax collected from guests, owed to the local taxing authority
• Gift Card Liability (2260) — outstanding gift card balances

Worth noting separately from these: guests who book through a traditional travel agency rather than a self-service OTA often get billed on invoice terms instead of paying by card at booking. Accounts Receivable - Travel Agencies (1210) and Accounts Receivable - Corporate (1220) keep those net-terms balances out of your regular trade receivables, where a 30-day travel-agency invoice would otherwise skew your average collection period.

How This Gets Booked: Two Scenarios

A guest books three nights through an online travel agency. Whether the OTA collects payment and remits a net amount, or the hotel collects the full rate and pays a commission afterward, the accounting should work the same way: book the full nightly rate to Room Revenue (4000) so your ADR and RevPAR (revenue per available room) reporting reflects the real room rate, not a discounted net. Record the commission owed as OTA Commissions (6510), an operating expense, with the unpaid balance sitting in OTA Payables (2010) until it's settled. Netting the commission straight against revenue is the single most common mistake we see in hotel books — it quietly understates ADR and makes it impossible to compare one booking channel against another later.

A guest checks out after a stay that included dinner and the resort fee. The deposit taken at booking sits in Customer Deposits (2240) — a liability, not revenue, because under GAAP's revenue recognition principle, income isn't earned until the room is actually occupied. At checkout, the front desk system splits the folio: Room Revenue (4000) for the room nights, Food & Beverage Revenue (4100) for the dinner, Resort Fees (4300) for the mandatory fee — and the Customer Deposits liability clears out. Direct Housekeeping Labor (5100) sits against the room nights; Food & Beverage Cost (5300) sits against the dinner. Each department manager sees a P&L built from costs that are actually theirs.

Get Started

Our hospitality chart of accounts template includes all of these accounts pre-configured and ready to import into QuickBooks — departmental revenue, direct costs, OTA liabilities, and occupancy tax tracking. It takes 60 seconds to optimize and gives you the reporting structure a property with more than one revenue stream actually needs.

Try the free demo →