The accountant asks for last year's costs. What arrives is a shoebox: faded till receipts, a few invoices, some bank lines nobody can match to anything, and a genuine belief that the cash purchases at the market were "about" a certain figure.
A weekend disappears reconstructing it. Some receipts have faded to blank. Several cash purchases are simply estimated, which means the accounts are an estimate. Anything that could have been claimed and cannot be evidenced is quietly dropped.
None of this is a bookkeeping failure. It is a capture failure: the cheapest moment to record a cost is the moment it happens, and every hour after that makes it more expensive and less accurate.
Recording an expense against a category, with the receipt photographed and attached and the member of staff attributed, takes about fifteen seconds at the supplier. It is the same fifteen seconds that costs half an hour in February.
This is deliberately not an accounting system. It touches no folio and no tax engine — an expense is money the property spent, not money a guest owes — and keeping those apart is what stops a supplier invoice ever appearing on somebody's bill.
Why this matters to you: the money is not in the bookkeeping, it is in the claims you can evidence and the questions you can answer. A property that knows what it spent last month can act on it; one that finds out in February can only regret it.