When financial truth depends on operational truth
For Switchplace, the pressure became real the moment one of its largest enterprise clients required the company to move to a compliant, modern reservation system — on a short timeline.
That requirement became the catalyst for Software Answers’ CodeOne property management system. And what followed was not just a software migration. It was a deeper question: could the new system also support the financial precision a business like Switchplace needs?
Switchplace operates on a flexible lease-to-match model. When a client needs units in a market, the company sources inventory, matches leases to the order, and manages the full operational and financial structure around that demand. A single client order can involve new markets, different lease terms, owned or third-party inventory, set-up costs, furniture, housekeeping, and varying lengths of stay.
That means cost of goods sold is constantly evolving. Profitability cannot be assumed. It has to be understood, explained, and ensured.
CodeOne became the system that turns that complexity into operational and financial visibility.
Meet the voices of Switchplace: Tammy Gillespie, Ann Graves, and Jose Vargas
Switchplace’s story starts with its founder, Tammy Gillespie. She held account executive roles with two leading industry providers through the early and mid-1990s before founding Switchplace in 1998. More than three decades in corporate housing gives her a perspective that is less about software and more about what it takes to run a business that enterprise clients can depend on. Since founding Switchplace, she has built the company around a clear standard: service-driven corporate housing that performs when the stakes are high.
Under her leadership, Switchplace has grown into a Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) certified, woman-owned business with reach across the Americas, EAME and APAC regions. Tammy is an active member of CHPA and ERC, and participates in a nationwide CEO peer advisory network, a signal of how she leads: with peer accountability, not just institutional instinct.
That relationship-first foundation is central to how the company operates. Its ability to move quickly across markets depends on decades of trust built with multifamily property owners, management companies, and other corporate housing providers.
The clearest view into the operating model comes through two members of the Switchplace leadership team: Ann Graves, Chief Financial Officer, and Jose Vargas, Vice President of Compliance.
Jose has been with Switchplace for 26 years. He joined when the company was still a small team and grew with it through multiple generations of technology. Over time, he became the company historian, trainer, and CodeOne in-house superuser.
Ann joined Switchplace in late 2020, bringing a Finance and CPA background and experience from a career working in publicly traded oil and gas companies. What began as a project to strengthen the financial integration between CodeOne and QuickBooks became a broader role spanning finance, strategy, and business development.
Jose understands how the work gets done. Ann ensures the numbers tell the truth before reservation acceptance, during execution and when done.
When enterprise requirements became the catalyst for change
The move to CodeOne began with a clear business requirement: one of Switchplace’s largest enterprise clients needed its housing provider to operate on software that could meet modern security and compliance standards.
Corporate housing reservation systems contain sensitive employee and guest information, including personally identifiable information. For large enterprise clients, that means the software behind the stay must be secure, testable, and built to withstand modern cyber risk.
At the time, Switchplace was using a widely used “on-premise” application accessed through remote desktop protocol (RDP). That architecture did not support the level of penetration testing and security validation the client required.
For a business built on trust, responsiveness, and large corporate relationships, staying on an on-premise legacy application was not an option.
The requirement became the catalyst for CodeOne.
Switchplace needed a modern, cloud-based SaaS platform that could support enterprise expectations around security, compliance, and operational continuity — without slowing down the business.
Jose Vargas, Vice President of Compliance at Switchplace, remembers the pressure clearly: “Normally you do these transitions in a year. We did it in less than six months. So it was insane.”
The timeline was intense, but the lesson was bigger than the migration itself: long-term stay providers that want to serve large enterprise clients need systems built for modern security expectations.
In that world, legacy on-premise applications and RDP can become a growth constraint. Modern SaaS architecture is no longer just a technology preference. It is part of the trust layer enterprise clients expect.
Once CodeOne was in place, Switchplace had cleared the first hurdle: moving onto a modern platform that could support enterprise client expectations.
But the next opportunity was just as important.
For Switchplace, modernization could not stop at security and access. The system also had to support the financial precision required to manage a complex lease-to-match model, where revenue, expenses, lease timing, and cost of goods sold are constantly evolving.
That is where CodeOne’s purpose-built subledger became critical.
The operational story behind the financial numbers
For Switchplace, financial clarity depends on more than sending data into accounting software.
It depends on whether the operational system can organize the business data correctly before the numbers ever reach the general ledger.
That is where CodeOne matters. Like Software Answers’ broader platform portfolio, CodeOne is built with a purpose-built subledger designed for the complexity of long-term stay operations: owned and third-party inventory, reservations, lease timing, average daily rates, billing structures, revenue and expense allocation, credits, refunds, and period-based reporting.
That distinction matters because reservation data is where the financial truth begins.
A guest-folio-based PMS can show charges tied to a stay. But a business like Switchplace needs more than a folio. It needs to understand how each reservation connects to lease commitments, cost of goods sold, inventory source, revenue timing, expense timing, and profitability.
Ann describes CodeOne as the subledger underlying QuickBooks. When finance wants to understand the drivers of revenue and/or profitability, the team does not start with standalone spreadsheets or basic QuickBooks transaction logs. They go to CodeOne to understand the operational reality behind the numbers.
“We treat CodeOne as the subledger to QuickBooks for all of our accounting analysis of revenue and operating costs. If we have a question like, why is revenue in QuickBooks what it is, we’re going to go to the CodeOne reporting functionality and look at the transaction details: the number of units, the ADRs and lease terms and whether the stays were recorded as daily or nightly.”
Ann Graves, CFO, Switchplace
For Switchplace, the value is not simply that CodeOne connects to QuickBooks. It is that CodeOne feeds QuickBooks the right financial information, organized in accordance with the operational logic of the business, but also in the period of service, as required for accurate financial reporting.
Revenue from a long lease needs to be recognized in the right service periods, regardless of when collected. Expenses need to align with the stays and units they support. Voids, credits, refunds, and adjustments need to flow through the system seamlessly without distorting the financial story.
CodeOne’s value came from the fact that its financial structure was already built for the realities of corporate housing. During implementation, Switchplace validated that structure extensively against real-world scenarios: long leases, varying terms, changing expenses, third-party inventory, credits, voids, refunds, and period-based reporting.
The result was financial output the team could trust. Not because CodeOne is another tool connected to QuickBooks, but because CodeOne understands the corporate housing business deeply enough to structure the financial data accurately before it reaches the accounting system.
That is the power of a purpose-built subledger: it turns operational complexity into financial clarity finance teams can trust.
Operational accuracy starts with clean data
Jose is clear about one important point: data entry discipline matters.
Because Switchplace uses CodeOne to understand financials, forecast future financial results, and monitor performance, reservations, units, costs, lease terms, and classifications need to be entered correctly the first time. That is not a software limitation. It is the reality of any operational backbone.
As Ann puts it: when something looks wrong in the output, the team can trace it back and determine whether the reservation setup was wrong. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
But when the data is entered correctly, the system becomes a trusted source.
“I run a forward forecast using ADRs and lengths of stay from the CodeOne reporting. And that is our Bible. And then we analyze variances from that. The results are always that the variances are real variances, it is not that the CodeOne data was incorrect.”
Ann Graves, CFO, Switchplace
That gives leadership confidence. They can look at the numbers and know they are seeing the business, not a reporting artifact.
Running operations with accountability
For Jose, the operational value of CodeOne shows up in the daily work. In a lease-to-match model where every unit may have different timing, setup requirements, and financial implications, the system gives the team a centralized place to track what needs to happen and when.
As Jose puts it, “it has been doing everything that it’s supposed to be doing - our move-ins, running reports on our action items. Do we need to give notice to this unit? Do we need to follow up with our guests?” Those questions are not administrative noise. They are the mechanics of protecting margin and delivering exceptional guest experiences.
Jose sees the next opportunity clearly: smarter detection. Today, the team runs reports to make sure revenue and expenses match correctly across third-party and core inventory — “making sure those accounts aren’t mixed,” as he puts it. In the future, he looks forward to the system catching mismatches earlier and automatically, freeing the team for higher-value work. The case for CodeOne as the right foundation for that automation is already proven.
The lesson in Switchplace’s story
Switchplace is proof that operational excellence in corporate housing is not a single thing. It is built on relationships, disciplined execution, and operational and financial truth. This requires a property management system that can hold all three together without forcing trade-offs between them.
Tammy’s relationship-first foundation gives Switchplace the trusted network to serve clients across markets. Jose’s operational knowledge translates complex stay requirements into reliable workflows. Ann’s financial discipline ensures the numbers reflect the real economics of the business.
CodeOne is the backbone that connects those strengths, helping Switchplace meet enterprise client expectations while giving the team a clearer view into the financial and operational details behind every stay. Not just what happened financially, but why it happened operationally.
That requires:
- A trusted network for flexible sourcing across markets
- Modern SaaS architecture that meets enterprise compliance expectations
- A PMS purpose-built for long-term stay inventory complexity
- Clean operational data finance can trust
- Reporting that explains the numbers behind the accounting system
- Workflows that support mixed inventory and lease-to-match models
- A software partner with deep domain expertise
For Switchplace, CodeOne by Software Answers helps bring the operational and financial story together. In a business where margin depends on timing, accuracy, relationships, and constant coordination, that visibility is what gives leaders control. As Ann puts it: “We’re strong advocates of CodeOne.”