Predictive Cashflow for Seasonal Hotel Operations

Hotel finance teams face large weekly swings in inflows and outflows driven by seasonality, group cancellations, OTA settlement timing and concentrated payroll/supplier cycles. That volatility forces last-minute short-term borrowing, missed early-payment discounts, and hours of spreadsheet reconciliation, distracting finance from strategic work.

Build an integrated forecasting pipeline that replaces ad-hoc spreadsheets with probabilistic scenarios, automated exceptions and an approval flow that preserves human judgment and auditability.

• Ingest transactional sources (PMS/booking engine, OTA settlements, POS, ERP AP/AR, payroll and card settlements) with data lineage and basic cleaning.
• Train ensemble time-series and causal models for occupancy, ADR and receipts, then map to daily cash positions; produce probabilistic (P50/P90) scenarios for 30-120 days.
• Add an explainability layer and an LLM-based narrative that summarizes drivers (group block changes, big invoices, unusual refunds) and highlights high-risk dates.
• Surface forecasts in FP&A dashboards with exception alerts and a human-in-the-loop approval/override workflow that writes approved adjustments back to the ERP/treasury system.
• Implement governance: model validation cadence, performance monitoring, access controls, and immutable audit logs for forecasts and overrides.

Illustrative impact: teams typically cut manual forecasting time by 30-60% and reduce emergency short-term borrowing by 10-25% through earlier visibility and planning. Forecast accuracy for 30-90 day cash positions often improves from ~20-35% MAPE to ~6-12% MAPE, enabling working capital improvements roughly equivalent to 2-8% of monthly operating expenses and fewer missed supplier discounts.