The hospitality industry is people-centric involving constant interaction with the public from across the spectrum, including individuals, groups, government and non-government agencies, and corporates. The hotel business is equally people-oriented internally, where the front desk and the various other departments, including restaurants, gift shops, bars, and other departments must work in coherence to achieve the set goals. Financial discipline remains the bottom line for the success of hotel business owners that own one or multiple properties.
COVID-19 is a great eye-opener to the hospitality sector where the properties with foresightedness have acted cautiously in sailing through the turmoil with planning, while a great majority have sustained severe losses. The below-mentioned factors remained decisive for the financial success of an individual or group of properties during financial emergencies and after when things returned to normalcy.
- Budget Forecasting
- Tracking income and Expenditure
- Financial information policy (Control and Access Financial Information)
- Approval mechanism
- Analytical Dashboards with KPI
Technological Innovations in Hotel Financial Management
Of late, several hotel accounts and bookkeeping software have come with innate options to customize hospitality financial management. Features such as PMS Integration with hotel accounting software enabled bill automation, budget forecasting, generating key financial reports, and control over expenditures and helped hotel owners to promote business at scale. Nimble, the Top Hotel Accounting Software in the USA has been at the forefront of getting customer appreciation from hoteliers across the USA for the below-mentioned features.
Hotel Financial Management Features in the Nimble Property
Budget Forecasting
At the end of each financial year, hotel owners can generate a balance sheet, which is a detailed financial report that clearly states income, expenditure, liabilities, and assets the company owns. Having deducted the expenditure and liabilities, a hotel owner will get profit, which is essential for recharging business with new plans. The top accounting software for hospitality forecasts the budget for the forthcoming year, which helps the business to assess challenges, risks, opportunities, and future market trends.
Tracking Income and Expenditure
Nimble Accounting software tracks every single cent earned and spent. Hotels earn income from daily room rents, revenue from banquet halls, the sale of food and beverages, and souvenirs and gifts. Companies need to spend on overheads like salaries, vendor bill payments, bank interests, mortgages, and insurance. The online accounting software tracks the financial information to create night audits, which in turn helps generate daily sales reports. The hotel owner gets his alarm bells ringing in advance to assess the risk and plug in the excesses if any.
Financial information policy (Control and Access to Financial Information)
Nimble Accounting software restricts and confines access to financial information. A person who is acting as a General Manager of a property will be able to see the financial details of the property under his/her control alone. If you are a property owner, you will have access to a ‘Master Account’ of all the properties you own over the screen along with the number of bills awaiting approval and the number of approved bills to be paid.
In Nimble Accounting Software, a hotel owner can create his/her corporation, detailing the property name and address, the name of the hotel owner, and the other primary contact details, including the bank account number. Nimble Software allows the owners to pick their geographical region while creating their user account to see properties in the region where they are operating. For example, a property owner having operations in the USA can skip hotel brand names popular in Canada. While a hotel owner that possesses the master copy of all accounts can restrict a hotel GM to access the financial information of other properties. Likewise, the GM of a property can restrict the access to financial information to internal staff equally. The restaurant manager may not get access to information on room occupancy levels, or revenue generated from banquet halls and room rents.
Vendor Bill Management
The very first widget a user comes across in the Top Hotel Accounting Software is “Cheques to be Printed” This widget displays the number of vendor bills to be paid. The moment a user clicks on the numbers mentioned on the widget (“Bills”}, it displays all the pending invoices. All that a user needs to do here is to mark them as waiting for payment. A user need not repeat the process of selecting each invoice and writing a cheque for printing because Nimble software prints multiple cheques in one go. The user can also track recurring dues and the due date for collecting/ recovery of dues along with the number of recurring journal entries awaiting approval.
Generates Daily Sales Report
Nimble software allows a property owner to view the bank and credit card balance as per the postings entered in the software. “Daily Sales Automation “helps users to view night audits. Night audits uploaded on “PMS” can be imported automatically into Nimble Property. The user needs to check the automated bills and approve them. By populating the numbers from the night audits, Nimble accounting software generates a “daily Sales” report.
Tracking Property Performance
Nimble Accounting Software allows property owners to track the performance of each property based on the actuals entered in the software under the “performance” tab. This page provides an overview of each property’s performance. It will also enable property owners to compare it with the actual budget. Property owners can also compare the performance of inter-departments here to get a clear view of ROI from restaurants vs. banquet halls. This process helps property owners to bridge the gaps and improve inter-departmental performance to strengthen the overall performance of the property.
Approval Policy
Nimble Software allows property owners to set an approval mechanism. A GM can authorize an employee or a set of employees to enter the bill amount awaiting approval and the next layer to review and pass it on to the third or the final layer for approval and payment. The hotel management can create an accountant role in the software and can assign responsibilities related to a particular property. This action provides access to a specific property alone. A person with no roles cannot access the information. An entry-level approver can be restricted to entering a bill of $500 alone and an approver can also be restricted to reviewing a bill worth $500 for payment.
Analytical Dashboards with KPI
The hotel management gets a visually rich and analytical dashboard that offers financial information on multiple properties in one go.
Final Thoughts
The cloud-based accounting software acts as your financial manager by tracking all financial entries, including revenue, expenditure, bank deposits, and profit. Hotel owners can customize the software to access financial information by defining their entry and approval policies to ensure effective financial management of multiple properties using one platform.
