Case Study · Hospitality
One master agreement, and every property billed differently
A hospitality group negotiates one master service agreement covering every property: set rates, included preventive visits, capped callout fees, across kitchen equipment, grounds, and other site services. Then each hotel or resort receives its own invoices, approved by whoever is on shift, and the negotiated terms stop mattering. The vendor bills property by property from the standard rate card, and nobody is positioned to notice.
The problem
Multi-property hospitality runs on serviced equipment and site services alike: kitchen fryers, grills, and refrigeration alongside grounds crews and other site-services contracts. The contracts are signed centrally, but the invoices land locally, property by property, month by month.
An on-site manager approving a $340 invoice has no copy of the master agreement and no time to read one. So trip charges appear at properties whose plan includes travel. Quarterly grounds visits or hood cleanings get billed monthly. Two properties serviced in one run each pay a full callout. The amounts are too small to fight individually and too scattered for anyone to add up.
Downtime pressure makes it worse. When a fryer dies or a storm forces an emergency grounds callout, the priority is getting the property running again, and the invoice that follows gets paid without a second look. Emergency work is exactly where the rate card and the negotiated terms drift furthest apart.
What Canary changes
Canary holds the master agreement and checks the invoices from every property against it. A rate above the negotiated schedule, a callout fee the plan already includes, or one visit billed to two properties gets flagged before the payment run, with the clause cited.
The group also sees the pattern: which vendors bill correctly, which properties leak, and what the same service costs across the portfolio, so the next negotiation starts from evidence the group already owns.