Hospitality companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to boost efficiency and improve the guest experience.
According to a 2024 survey, global hotel chains expected more innovation from AI than any other area over the following two years.
This growing focus on AI is not limited to front-of-house functions like check-in or personalised recommendations.
Behind the scenes, finance teams are using automation and AI to handle repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and speed up workflows.
With rising pressure to do more with less, efficiency is no longer optional.
If you are struggling to keep up with the latest advancements, this guide will help you navigate your options and stay ahead.
How Are AI and Automation Transforming Finance Operations in the Hospitality Industry?
AI and automation are already transforming how hospitality finance teams work.
From streamlining day-to-day processes to cutting down on admin-heavy tasks, these technologies offer real ways to work faster and more accurately.
To show how this works in practice, we will use two systems as our reference points: SunSystems and UniFi.
SunSystems is a modern financial management system (FMS) that can replace outdated legacy systems.
It is built for multi-entity, multi-currency environments like hospitality and offers full financial control—while helping reduce costs and simplify operations.
UniFi is a powerful automation platform designed to connect your core finance system to everything else—your PMS, PoS, booking engines, payment platforms, etc.
On top of this, it brings in AI and autonomous processing to further reduce manual work and improve speed and accuracy.
Together, SunSystems and UniFi give finance teams a complete setup: one system to run core finance, and one to automate, connect, and enhance everything around it.
Let us look at four key areas where AI and automation are transforming finance in hospitality, using UniFi’s features as examples.
1. Hospitality Accounting Automation
Many accounting solutions claim to offer automation, but most still rely on manual steps like posting transactions into accounting systems.
For hotels handling large transaction volumes across bookings, food and beverage, and other revenue streams, these manual processes slow things down and increase the chance of errors.
Unlike platforms that only automate approvals, UniFi’s Accounting Automation feature goes further by fully automating accounting postings—completely removing the need for manual input.
No other platform on the market matches this capability.
By fully automating postings, UniFi enables hospitality finance teams to spend less time on admin and more time on value-added tasks like forecasting and financial planning.
What Your Finance Team Should Do Now
If your team still spends time posting transactions or checking approval logs, look at automation platforms (UniFi) that handle the full accounting process end-to-end.
Rather than speeding up manual work you can remove it entirely, so your team can focus on higher value and more fulfilling tasks.
2. Autonomous Processes for Hospitality Finance
Hotels manage high transaction volumes daily across multiple departments and locations.
Traditional finance processes depend heavily on manual input, which is slow, costly, and prone to errors.
Basic automation helps, and is a step in the right direction, but often needs human oversight.
“Autonomous Processes” mark the next evolution and embody the future of operational efficiency
This is a unique UniFi feature that works without human involvement—executing tasks at speed and scale in the background.
UniFi’s autonomous finance feature introduces bot users that run financial workflows in the background or in real-time.
Examples of UniFi Bots in Hospitality Finance
- Email Extraction Bot – Monitors any email address and automatically creates transactions from incoming mail. It uses our next-level Autonomous Data Capture and AI-powered machine learning functionality to extract key data from attachments and populate fields in the relevant app automatically.
- AI Services with ChatGPT – Uses two types of AI (machine learning and generative AI) to enable and enhance OCR and autonomous data capture for hospitality finance teams. It can be trained on hotel-specific documents like supplier invoices and booking confirmations and can recognise patterns and extract key details such as invoice numbers and VAT amount. The generative AI understands the context of documents—automatically categorising items like minibar restocking under F&B or travel receipts under staff expenses.
- UniFi Scheduler – Runs routine financial processes such as monthly reconciliations and reports on time, every time. It triggers UniFi transactions automatically at set times—like every Monday at 9 AM or monthly. You can also preset fields, such as sending a recurring invoice or uploading exchange rates daily, with no manual input.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – RPA automates repetitive tasks, such as vendor checks, payments, and account reconciliations
These autonomous processes reduce admin, cut errors, and give finance teams more time for analysis and planning.
What Your Finance Team Should Do Now
Review any process that is still rule-based but carried out manually.
If bots can follow the same steps every time, those tasks are ready for autonomous processing.
3. Advanced Autonomous Data Capture for Hospitality
Hospitality businesses handle a huge variety of documents—many of them inconsistent or handwritten.
Most traditional OCR tools are not up to the task. They rely on static templates and struggle with unstructured or poorly formatted content, leading to more manual corrections.
UniFi’s Autonomous Data Capture changes this by using advanced machine learning to pull data from any document—scanned, handwritten, or digital—regardless of layout or format.
It also applies confidence scores, helping validate accuracy before data enters your finance system.
What This Means for Hospitality Finance
- Faster processing of invoices, receipts, and guest records
- Less time spent on document handling and corrections
- More accurate, real-time financial data for analysis and reporting
With fewer errors and faster workflows, teams can move away from reactive firefighting and start using their data more proactively.
What Your Finance Team Should Do Now
Look at how much time your team spends processing paper-based or emailed documents and manually inputting data into your business systems.
If manual data entry is still common, it is time to adopt advanced data capture technology that can read, extract, and validate automatically at scale.
4. Connecting Disconnected Hospitality Systems
One of the biggest challenges for finance teams in hospitality is managing fragmented data.
PMS, PoS, booking engines, and revenue systems often do not integrate well, forcing finance teams to manually extract, reconcile, and rekey financial data.
UniFi solves this with powerful middleware—connecting all systems and enabling real-time, automated data flows.
This reduces duplication, cuts errors, and gives finance teams full visibility across the business.
Instead of chasing spreadsheets, your team can focus on strategy, forecasting, and control.
What Your Finance Team Should Do Now
Map out where data is currently moving between systems manually.
If your team is touching the same data more than once, that is a sign those systems need to be connected—automatically.
Additionally, if you are experiencing data sync issues or do not have timely access to data, it is time to consider a solution that can solve those issues.
Conclusion
AI and automation are no longer optional for hospitality finance teams looking to stay ahead in a fast-moving industry.
The opportunity is not just to speed up existing tasks; it is to rethink how your finance team works entirely.
If your current setup still depends on manual steps, fragmented systems, or limited automation, now is the time to rethink it.
We can help you get started. Book a call today to discuss your options and get a free demo to see what is possible.
