Introduction:
Accounting should propel you forward, not look backward
As your hotels grow in size and complexity, is your accounting system holding you back?
Whether you’re a multi-location company or a franchisee with just one hotel, many operators find that what worked fine in the past can gradually start to present obstacles to future growth. Manual processes and a lack of visibility across your entire business means you never get the true and timely picture.
The fact is, hotels generate abundant financial and operational data that flows into the business from multiple streams, such as point of sale, reservations, and property-management systems. And many hotels and resorts operate with distinct entities such as restaurants, spas, and golf clubs. Powerful, enterprise-class cloud accounting provides the integrations with best-in-class systems to turn that data into insights efficiently and accurately. Those reports that used to take hours? Done, in minutes. Consolidations for your entities that used to take weeks? Automated, in real time.
The right accounting software minimizes the manual work in getting the insights you need, so you can spend more time driving profitability and growth.
Hotel Visibility
Stay on top of revPAR to maximize profitability
During changing and difficult times, hotels are especially challenged to keep a vigilant eye on the bottom line. That’s why most hotels track RevPAR (room revenue/rooms available) and average daily rate (ADR).
Owners and operators want to see these metrics to spot threats and capitalize on opportunities. For instance, you can see how occupancy levels rise and fall based on changing room rates, cancellations, and other factors. And the best way to optimize those numbers is to ensure you’re getting accurate and timely information from your accounting system.
Granular Insight into your Costs
To identify and respond to problem areas, you need insight into how each property is performing compared to your budget or a prior period.
Make sure cost of goods sold has a prominent place on your dashboard. Next, track your RevPAR and ADR statistics as dimensions so you can drill down into the details.
When you see costs and statistics this way, you’ll see the areas you need to investigate. If the cost of an item is too high compared to budget, is it time to renegotiate or switch vendors? If RevPAR is growing, the next question is: Is it profitable growth? What are the costs per occupied room (CPOR)? Are ancillary entities, such as catering, parking, and spa services, providing added margin to your bottom line?
Taking corrective action starts with precise insights.
Best practices to tracking costs
1. View labor costs as a performance card metric on your dashboard.
2. Use Sage Intacct dimensions to slice and dice your data for maximum visibility
and impact.
3. Automate accounts payable and payroll processes to eliminate timeconsuming, error-prone tasks—and get real-time insights into your costs.
See the full context of your labor costs
Labor costs, including wages, recruitment, taxes, and benefits, are typically presented as a percentage of sales.
While labor-cost targets will have a different impact in each hotel, there are ways to leverage a flexible cloud accounting system to control this crucial area.
Assign your staff into different categories, such front desk, housekeeping, restaurant servers, kitchen staff, and management. By creating different reporting dimensions, you can easily see what is driving your costs. Drill into these dimensions to generate labor reports that show whether your hotel is being staffed at the right levels for the right times of day, so you can course-correct if needed.
Best practices to tracking costs
1. Keep labor costs within your line of sight on your dashboard.
2. Assign staff into different categories and create dimensions to easily generate labor
reports for a clearer view of costs.
3. Use scheduling apps to manage your labor costs and integrate them with your cloud accounting management system and run labor reports in real time.
Speed to Insights:
Improve visibility and save time
If your various entities support multiple instances of accounting software, you’re likely spending hours or days manipulating data with spreadsheets, tools, and workarounds. That means your business must make decisions based on outdated information.
Best practices to tracking costs
1. Track and report on your business using a shared dimensional chart of accounts that enables you to slice and dice data in meaningful ways and build custom reports in minutes. No more manipulating spreadsheets.
2. Automate financial consolidation – including inter-entity transactions, local tax reporting, currency conversions, and more. View the current financials of each location, brand, and entity at any time.
3. Integrate your cloud-accounting system with best-in-class applications for POS, inventory management, room reservations, labor scheduling, and more. No more manual data entry
Create detailed custom reports in minutes
Take advantage of custom reporting that meets the exact requirements of each entity.
Thanks to dimensional drilldowns, you’ll have reports in minutes that create a deeper understanding of performance drivers at your hotel. For example, drill down into room occupancy rates by location. See operating margins across your locations and entities within a report.
With combined insights on the location’s sales and costs, you can make informed decisions on room rates, promotions, labor costs/staffing, and more.
Stakeholders throughout the company should be empowered to create and use reports that they need. Sage Intacct tools are simple enough for anyone – from the staff accountant to the CFO – to create role-based dashboards and financial reports within minutes. That means greater frequency and greater accuracy.
Evolve into a Strategic Business Partner
Your hotels have an abundance of operational and financial data. The right cloud-accounting system enables you to quickly harness that data to make proactive management decisions, by bringing:
- Flexible and custom reporting that fits your needs. Use custom financial and operational dashboards based on a dimensional GL structure so you can make data-driven decisions, easily.
- Accuracy and speed with automation. Automate ongoing finance tasks like financial consolidations so they take minutes, not weeks.
- Real-time visibility across systems. Integrate your hotel systems so you can easily maintain a current, holistic financial view all in one place.
Sage Intacct enables hotels to operate on strategic insights through access to real-time information instead of backward-looking data. Dimensional reporting gives you the most granular details. And you can also instantly roll up multiple entities for a complete, strategic view of company performance.
Conclusion
Why do hotels trust Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct is the innovation and customer satisfaction leader in cloud financial management. AICPA-endorsed and best-in-class, Sage Intacct is a scalable and extensible system that provides multidimensional analysis and industry-specific capabilities to automate complex processes and improve company performance, so data-driven finance leaders can focus on strategic initiatives.
Source: Sage.com
