Xero is very good at recording bills and paying them. What it doesn’t do on its own is everything that has to happen before a bill is ready to pay. Someone has to collect it, key it in, code it, check it against what was ordered, and get it approved by the right person.

In most small and mid-sized businesses, that work is still manual. Bills arrive in five different inboxes, get printed, sit on someone’s desk, and are entered into Xero the week before the payment run. That’s where errors, late fees, and duplicate payments come from.

A chef runs to the market because the fish delivery came up short. A villa manager buys a replacement pool pump fitting from the hardware store. A tour guide pays park entry fees for twelve guests in cash.

All of these are real business costs, paid by staff, often out of their own pockets. Each one has to be checked, approved, recorded, and paid back.

In hospitality and tourism this happens every day, across many people and many locations. Done badly, staff wait weeks to get their money back, receipts go missing, and finance spends month-end chasing paperwork. Done well, it’s quick for staff and gives finance the control it needs.

Tourism is the backbone of Bali’s economy. It is a main source of regional revenue and a major employer, and it supports a wide range of small businesses, from family warungs to tour operators and village tourism groups.

A 2025 paper by researchers at Warmadewa University in Denpasar asks a simple question: what role should accounting play in managing that industry well?

This article summarises what the paper found, and adds a practitioner’s view of what it means for tourism businesses in Bali today.

Every accounts payable team has to answer one question before paying a supplier: should we pay this bill, and for this amount?

Invoice matching is how you answer it. Instead of trusting the invoice on its own, you compare it against other records of what was agreed and what actually happened. The two most common methods are 2-way and 3-way matching.

What is 2-way matching?

2-way matching compares two documents: