Notes on hotel invoices, spend, and procurement.
Short, practical pieces on the problems Atrium was built to solve — supplier price creep, duplicate invoices, billed-but-not-received items, and the pre-payment review that catches them before money leaves.
Written while building the product with a working hotel, not from the outside.
Notes from inside one hotel's invoices.
These are not procurement think pieces. They are written by Atrium's founder while building an invoice review product alongside a hotel in Niagara Falls — what the invoices actually showed, not what the textbooks say they should.
The material is real and it is narrow. Eight months of supplier invoices at one property: 137 invoices, 1,214 line items, and $111,257 of spend across eight suppliers, from broadline foodservice and guest amenities through to coffee and beverage.
So the examples are specific. A house blend coffee that went from $160.50 to $211.69. A bottle fee that went from $2.00 to $6.00. Two mop lines billed the same way every single week at another property, on a rental agreement that covers both as free replacement up to a stock percentage — the same $23.63 leaking, week after week, from one supplier.
Most of these run three or four minutes. They are written for the person who approves the invoices, not for a procurement conference — and where something is still uncertain, the post says so.
What you will not find here
- No case studies.
- No benchmarks borrowed from another industry.
- No number that did not come off an actual invoice.
Prices that crept up. Fees that tripled. The same two lines billed every week. These are the notes from watching it happen.
The ones that explain the rest.
If you read nothing else, read these. Between them they cover the check Atrium runs, the question it answers at month-end, and what a supplier invoice is actually carrying.
Everything published so far.
A few threads run through all of these: how hotel buying actually works, what an invoice contains, the check that compares it to the order, where the money went, and what software should never decide on its own.
Most of these started as posts on LinkedIn. Follow along on LinkedIn for new ones.
Read one. Then look at your own invoices.
The free Hotel Spend & Exception Report takes ten invoices forwarded by email. Atrium returns the price increases, the possible duplicates, and the lines worth a second look. No card, no commitment, nothing to install.