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A group running 20 hotels, with five more opening next year, faces a familiar question: does each new property need its own finance team? The default answer is usually yes, if that is how the existing hotels were set up. That default is getting harder to justify. When a property-level finance role sits vacant, the income audit falls to whoever is covering it, and outside major cities those vacancies are slow to fill. The work itself has changed too: much of the role was keying, copying and chasing, and software now does that part. The largest chains answered this by building shared service centres, often as multi-year projects. There is a lighter option. When finance work runs in one digital workflow, a new hotel joins the existing team instead of needing one of its own, usually within weeks, because the group's interfaces and mapping already exist. What each new hotel adds to the finance workload Every new hotel adds to the daily workload: another income audit, with a pack to compile, check and sign off each morning another approval chain for invoices, credit notes and adjustments another set of documents to file, and to find again when auditors ask another finance role to recruit, train and cover during leave Run separately, each property also develops its own version of these. Group finance then struggles to compare hotels, or to confirm that yesterday's income audit at a given property was signed off. A cluster is a team, not a building A hotel finance cluster is a group of properties whose finance work, such as the income audit, accounts payable and accounts receivable, is handled by one shared team. The team can sit in one office or across the group's existing hotels, so a dedicated head office is optional. When several hotels operate in the same city, the team often works from one of them. Hilton Netherlands clustered finance for five hotels, including large properties like Hilton Amsterdam and Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam. On the income audit, one person now covers three or more properties. In the clusters we have set up, ratios like that depend on how standardised the income audit already is and how many revenue streams each property runs, so treat any one figure as a planning reference. Clustering does reduce the number of finance roles a portfolio needs, though much of that absorbs vacancies that were hard to fill anyway. Staff who move into cluster roles can usually keep working from where they live. Agree the process before you digitise it Most groups start with the income audit, the daily review that confirms the previous day's revenue was captured, posted and approved correctly. It is the simplest finance process to standardise and in many hotels the biggest daily inefficiency. The instinct is to digitise it as it stands, only faster. But making a bad process electronic does not improve the process. A siloed, time-consuming audit becomes a siloed, time-consuming audit with a login. In a cluster, five versions of