Sage Intacct's best finance tools to save hoteliers time

Hospitality finance departments are perpetually busy. You're working in a sector comprising endless moving parts, external pressures and tight margins - which makes achieving efficiency easier said than done.

But that's not to say that hotel finance teams aren't focused on efficiency. Saving time – and unlocking the opportunities of faster processes – is a continuous goal for CFOs and other hospitality finance leaders. And one of the most effective strategies for saving time, driving revenue, and reducing operational costs is to rethink financial management software.

Enter Sage Intacct: the cloud accounting and financial management software built for hospitality and proven to deliver tangible efficiency gains.

Keep reading to discover the top four ways this clever financial tool saves hotel finance departments a significant amount of time in the short and long term.

What is Sage Intacct and how does it work?

Sage Intacct financial management software unblocks processes that are exceptionally time-consuming for hotels – but necessary to complete on time and with the utmost accuracy.

It eliminates the spreadsheet and paper-based actions familiar to hospitality finance professionals by integrating data, automating processes, and finding faster, more flexible ways to understand your organisation's financial status.

Sage Intacct allows hotel finance departments to see everything in one place and can reduce task times from days or hours to mere minutes. And that’s all while supporting the effectiveness of other business systems.

The top four time-saving tools in Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct Tool 1: Automated Reporting

Sage Intacct can pull financial and non-financial data from every system used by a hotel – which, as you'll know, there are many! Data is then compiled in Intacct and automatically presented via a dashboard or distributed to departments or people on set schedules.

What was once a significant job involving dozens of spreadsheets, awkward formulas and manual calculations are completed with a few clicks. And because Sage Intacct requires zero coding knowledge, any finance user can create customised, self-service dashboards for the precise insight they need. Here are a few examples:

• See your profit per cover for each restaurant in your hotel collection side-by-side
• Understand how your ADR changes if 5, 10, or 15 rooms are out for renovation
• Compare GOPPAR against the number of employees on payroll by week

Sage Intacct generates reports with just a few filters applied and automatically runs and distributes insights as specified by you. So, you see numbers and breakdowns in the most helpful way.

From here, hospitality finance departments can contribute to a more profitable operating strategy by better understanding how financial and non-financial data metrics interact.

Sage Intacct Tool 2: Dynamic Journals

The flexibility and simplicity of Sage Intacct make adjusting journal entries far faster, especially regarding accrued expenses and revenues (of which hotels have many).

This is because Sage Intacct automates some or all journal entries – pulling and compiling data from all connected systems, electronically-submitted invoices and other digital attachments in real time. So, as variables and, as a result – cost ratios - change, your financial insight remains accurate and up to date. For example:

• If the cost of electricity and gas changes, it becomes more expensive to heat set square footage to a set temperature. Sage Intacct dynamically decides the journal adjustment to reflect your new ratio for gas and electricity in the department budget.
• If the restaurant staff headcount reduces at one site in your portfolio, your profit per cover increases for that cost centre. Sage Intacct automatically decides the journal adjustment to reflect your new ratio for payroll in the department budget for the affected site.

And we can only talk about automated journal entries if we mention errors. Manual processes are prone to mistakes. After all, we're only human, and hotel teams are the busiest of folk. Being forced to reevaluate and make corrections can become costly; missed book closing delays decision making and potentially incurs penalties, while employers lose money on unproductive work.

Sage Intacct’s automated, dynamic journal functionality saves hospitality finance teams time and margin. And in our book, that’s a win-win.

Sage Intacct Tool 3: Budget Tracking

Sage Intacct essentially digitises budget management, tracking and approvals processes. And as you’ll know, these processes are exceptionally time-consuming for hotel finance departments! Especially if budgets are large, decisions more urgent, and approval sits higher up the approval chain, i.e., your regional management or portfolio group.

Moreover, tracking budget approvals can mean grappling with filing cabinets of paperwork and sprawling spreadsheets, which delays your understanding of inflows and outflows.

But Sage Intacct's intelligent financial management tools make easy work of managing budgeting processes and allow hospitality finance departments to do their job more efficiently.

Approval requests are automatically distributed to the relevant manager, while CFO dashboards give real-time visibility into budget approval status and value, with staff able to drill into financials for specific properties and locations.

If there's a reverse or cancelled journal entry (i.e., a wage accrual in liabilities), Sage Intacct automatically refers the change to the appropriate manager for re-approval. And if you notice an approvals deadline approaching that's unlikely to be met (it happens!), finance reams can reforecast in minutes.

Sage Intacct Tool 4: Audit Management

When hotels switch to Sage Intacct, the manual work undertaken by finance departments is significantly reduced. Journal entries, for example, are made by automation workflows, fed by data from integrated systems and digital documentation.

This smooth process gets the job done faster and reduces the possibility of misstatements and errors. But, more importantly, Sage Intacct's automated processes generate a trail behind every piece of financial data and decision.

A trail that hospitality finance teams can use to strengthen financial operations and that auditors can use to verify financial compliance and performance. When Sage Intacct supports your audit requirements, you can:

• Prepare for a successful audit more efficiently and confidently
• Rationalise financial decisions without spending hours piecing together a data or documentation puzzle
• See auditors in and out faster, so you can refocus on financial operations performance

Are time-consuming financial management processes obscuring your view of financial status and costing your hospitality business unnecessarily? Sage Intacct could be the solution your team has been looking for.

Sage Intacct liberates hotel financial departments from slow, unreliable spreadsheets and rigid financial processes. Instead, it provides you with the data and management tools to make better financial decisions faster without requiring you to disassemble financial and other systems and start again.

Everything happens from one flexible, integrated and intuitive cloud-based platform – so everyone can do their jobs more efficiently.

To see how Sage Intacct can help your hotel drive revenue and reduce operational costs, arrange a free demo [here].

Visit FIVE STAR FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE FOR HOTELS for more information now.