Best practices for data-driven hotels

Accounting should propel you forward, not look backward!

As your hospitality business grows 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.

Sage Intacct software for hotels and restaurants automates hospitality accounting and financial management to give you greater visibility into your hotel, restaurant, or other hospitality business, and help you make decisions that boost profitability. Instead of worrying about the intricacies of hospitality software or hotel accounting, Sage Intacct hotel management software leaves you free to focus on customer satisfaction

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Why do hotels trust Sage Intacct?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Hospitality Software Buyer’s Checklist

Accounting systems are not something that you change or replace often. However, as your hospitality organization must nimbly navigate complex challenges, you reach a point where manual processes drain your productivity, and you struggle to analyze your growing range of financial and operating data.

Lack of financial visibility hinders insightful decision making, which in turn hinders performance. At this point, you need a system that understands hospitality businesses and leverages the latest technological advancements.

At a minimum, a modern accounting system for hospitality businesses should automate and streamline core financial management functions such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, and financial close. But you can hardly fuel your organization and need for accountability and transparency by simply automating the minimum. Hospitality, in particular, has accounting, tracking, and reporting needs that require specialized functionality in their financial management systems.