How Plug-and-Play Benefits the Hotel Back Office

A New Way to Balance the Books Accounting departments have been hit hard during the pandemic, with many hospitality brands being forced to let one or more staff members go at a time when data analysis is more important than ever before. For those staff members who remain, time and attention spans have been significantly reduced, leading to “a breakdown in communication and transparency across a business,” Bennie notes. Aptech agrees, noting that when COVID-19 appeared, day-to-day AP tasks, such as invoice processing and check runs, suddenly became more difficult. Thankfully, “back-office teams are perpetually on the lookout for how they can improve efficiency,” which proves to be a wonderful skill to have during a pandemic. With many businesses asking their accounting teams to work from home, having an accounting solution that is cloud-based has become ever more important, says Sage Intacct. For example, reports and information that live on a server or in spreadsheets are not easily accessible to those not physically in the office. And a lack of real-time access to robust reporting prevents staff from making insightful decisions and keeps the business from being nimble. Another way technology can help is by removing repetitive tasks. Aptech found a way to do this by providing automated invoice processing to help streamline the AP process. The new capability utilizes OCR and machine learning technology to accurately capture critical invoice data elements from a scanned invoice and auto generate the invoice entry. All that remains is for the accounting team to review and post the entries. “It’s all about efficiency when it comes to the back office,” said Naples Bay Resort & Marina General Manager John Reilly. “We used to have a team of five accountants; now we have two. Aptech gives us a way to streamline accounts payable and invoice processing and remove a lot of the mundane data-entry tasks enabling our accountants to focus on other pressing matters.” ProfitSword’s ProfitAbility also uses machine-learning abilities to identify key organizational performance patterns, which can prove essential in determining what upcoming revenue, expenses or guest booking numbers may look like. And it can instantly alert time and resource strapped personnel to any “out of the ordinary” fluctuations that require immediate attention. “This is crucial in being able to identify suddenly arising risks that require an urgent reevaluation of business plans before further revenue is lost, or in locating previously unseen opportunities that can lead to greater stability or growth,” Bennie notes. Another area where technology has been able to help hotel accounting departments is: labor management. M3 found that labor management staff had to pivot from activity-based scheduling to only managing by total FTE or total labor dollar amount spent. To help with this, M3’s Insight platform enables the construction of new dashboards, allowing GMs to manage labor costs in the most efficient way possible. “We’ve found that M3’s custom labor reporting capabilities dramatically changed our workflows for the better once we switched to the Time Management platform,” said Kris Doyle, Corporate Controller at Granite Hospitality. “From a management perspective, labor is the greatest expense, and having a system in place that enables easy oversight and adjustment of labor management in one centralized, virtual location is a key factor in M3’s success with Granite Hospitality.” Unfortunately, many hotels find that their accounting software doesn’t integrate at all or very well with other technology in their stacks. However, Inn-Flow is one company that designed its solution specifically to be plug-and-play. The Inn-Flow software will integrate with any existing PMS, payroll, or other application already in a user’s tech stack. Why was this so important to Inn-Flow? “Most hoteliers aren’t technology experts — they’re hoteliers,” says Inn-Flow Founder and President John Erhart. “They don’t want to be system administrators or to manage technology, they want to take care of guests and team members.” Lee Smith, general manager at HOS Management LLC, couldn’t agree more. "As a General Manager, I went from spending 2 hours a day uploading manual items line by line to processing all of my daily items within a matter of 1 to 2 minutes with Inn-Flow's PMS integration,” Smith said. “This allows me to quickly move on to front-of-the-house items such as interacting with our guests.”

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