Picture a hotel's AP inbox on any given Monday. There's an invoice from the linen service, three from food and beverage suppliers, one from the elevator maintenance company, a late fee notice from last month's HVAC repair, and a vendor asking, politely but firmly, why their invoice from three weeks ago still hasn't been paid. Multiply that across a restaurant group with six locations or a hotel portfolio with twenty, and you've got a back office running on caffeine and spreadsheets.

Hospitality has a genuinely different AP problem than most industries. It's not just volume; it's volume paired with thin margins, high staff turnover, and vendor relationships that can make or break the guest experience if a shipment gets held up over a payment dispute. 37.5% of AP leaders identified a lack of automation as a major challenge in 2025, according to research from BirchStreet and Hotel Management magazine. That's not a small operational hiccup; that's a sector-wide problem.

Where hospitality AP actually breaks down

Invoices come from everywhere, in every format

A single property can receive bills from food and beverage suppliers, linen and laundry services, maintenance contractors, utilities, and a dozen other vendor categories, each with different terms, different GL codes, and different approval requirements. When that same complexity gets multiplied across multiple properties or locations, manual processing stops being tedious and starts being unsustainable.

Margins are too thin for AP mistakes to just slide

Hospitality has been squeezed hard on the cost side lately. Rising operating expenses have kept hotel gross operating profit per available room at roughly 90% of 2019 levels, meaning the gap between revenue recovery and profit recovery is largely a cost problem, and back-office inefficiency is a real contributor to that gap. When labor costs alone are projected to approach $131 billion industry-wide this year, a missed early payment discount or a duplicate payment isn't a rounding error; it's real money that should have stayed on the bottom line.

Cash flow moves in waves, but bills don't wait for the tide

Revenue in hotels and restaurants tends to concentrate around weekends, holidays, and peak seasons, while vendor payments and payroll show up on a steady, unforgiving schedule. That mismatch makes accurate short-term cash forecasting essential, and it's nearly impossible to forecast well when nobody has real-time visibility into what's actually owed and when.

Staff turnover keeps breaking the approval chain

Hospitality's turnover rate runs dramatically higher than most industries; annual turnover in hospitality sits around 74%, roughly five times the average for other sectors. Every time someone in the approval chain leaves, institutional knowledge about which vendor gets paid how, and who's supposed to sign off on what, walks out the door with them. That's how invoices sit unapproved for weeks.

Manual matching is slow, and it shows

Across industries generally, best-in-class AP teams process invoices in about 3.1 days with a 9% exception rate, while average performers take roughly 17.4 days with a 22% exception rate, according to Ardent Partners' Accounts Payable Metrics That Matter research. Hospitality businesses running on manual three-way matching, paper invoices, and email approval chains tend to land closer to the slow end, and every extra day of delay is a day closer to a late fee or a frustrated vendor.

What actually fixes it

None of this requires hiring a bigger AP team or accepting the chaos as the cost of doing business. It requires taking the manual steps out of the process:

• Centralize invoice capture: An AI-powered AP inbox that reads and codes bills automatically, regardless of which property or vendor they came from, removes the PDF-to-spreadsheet step that eats hours every week.

• Build approval workflows that don't depend on one specific person being in the building: Role-based approval routing means a bill gets to whoever's covering that responsibility today, not whoever set up the process two hires ago.

• Get real visibility into cash position across every location: When bills, vendor records, and bank activity sync automatically with your accounting platform, forecasting seasonal swings stops being guesswork.

• Pay vendors on your own terms: Instant payments that settle in under 60 seconds, even on weekends, mean you can hold cash longer without straining vendor relationships, or pay early when a discount makes sense.

This is essentially what Forwardly's accounts payable software is built to handle, and it's a big part of why we built a hospitality-specific solution in the first place. The AI-powered AP inbox captures and codes invoices automatically, smart approval workflows keep bills moving even when your team changes, and universal sync keeps everything current across QuickBooks Online, Xero, and other accounting and ERP platforms without anyone touching a keyboard twice.

If you're managing supplier relationships across multiple properties, our post on managing supplier payments in hotels digs deeper into the vendor side of this specifically.

So, how can hotels and restaurants actually speed up accounts payable without adding headcount? The short version: automate invoice capture so nothing depends on manual data entry, build approval rules around roles instead of specific people, and pay through a system that syncs with your accounting software instead of requiring a second round of manual reconciliation. That combination is what turns AP from a weekly fire drill into something that runs quietly in the background, which, frankly, is where accounting should live.

Ready to see it in action? Take a product tour or set up a free account and see what your AP inbox looks like when it stops fighting back.