Growing hotels provide a common problem, additional rooms, income, vendors, workers, transactions, invoices, payments, and financial data.
Does expansion, however, require hiring accountants at the same pace?
Not in all cases.
How much of the extra work can be automated by technology is a better question.
This idea is the foundation of Nimble Property, which uses automation, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile workflows, integrations, analytics, and electronic payments to assist hotel companies in growing their financial operations without completely depending on more manual labor.
The Conventional Scaling Framework
In the past, a hotel chain may expand as follows:
Add Hotel → Add Transactions → Add Accounting Task → Add Employees.
For a while, this could be effective.
However, running a sizable manual accounting operation eventually becomes expensive and complicated.
More are produced by each new property:
- Invoices from vendors.
- Acceptances.
- Money exchanges.
- Bank exchanges.
- Money deposits.
- Reconciliations.
- Financial reports.
- Labor data.
- Requests from management.
- It’s not only loudness that presents a problem.
- A large portion of the work is repetitious.
- Process invoices automatically first.
- One of the most obvious opportunities is accounts payable.
Vendor invoices and debit notes may be manually uploaded, emailed, or uploaded via a mobile device using Nimble Property’s AI-enabled OCR. Automatic COA coding minimizes the amount of repetitious categorization effort. Invoices are moved toward authorization by workflows that are ready for approval.
Accounting staff will therefore be able to enter and route invoices more quickly. Provide mobile access to approvers; an approval backlog may result from adding additional properties. Corporate leaders and managers are not always seated at their workstations.
Nimble Property’s mobile AP process allows consumers to:
Use their cameras to record fresh invoices.
- Give legislation approval
- Make print check batches.
- Keep an eye on payables KPIs
This lessens the delays brought on by desktop-only procedures.
• Make Payments Automated.
• More payments result from more hotels.
ACH transactions, customizable EFT exports, Canadian direct deposit exports, REPAY integration, and electronic payments are all supported by Nimble Property. Payment security is increased via multi-approval procedures. This enables businesses to handle payments automatically without sacrificing financial controls.
Link Accounting and Procurement
Scaling may result in more manual labour if purchasing and accounting are separate operations.
Invoices are entered into the books using Nimble Property’s BirchStreet interface, which facilitates the connection between accounting and procurement.
The more systems interact automatically, the less work accounting staff must do manually.
Make Bank Connectivity Automated
When the number of transactions rises, bank reconciliation can become a significant task.
Nimble Property increases bank connectivity by:
• Mastercard Fin city
• Plaid
• MX
Automatic synchronization, daily sales matching via card merge technology, direct reconciliation impacts, and payment matching to open bills all contribute to a reduction in manual reconciliation labour.
• Make Daily Cash Management Standardized
• Monitoring cash deposits increases with the number of properties.
• DS Cash and Checks offers a consolidated deposit management procedure with approvals.
Hotel staff can use mobile devices to enter daily deposits and upload pictures of deposit slips.
Corporate teams become more transparent across all properties. This is especially crucial as portfolios increase, as corporate personnel cannot personally supervise each deposit.
- Make Recurring Reports Automatic.
- Scaling also results in more reports being requested.
- A Daily Flash Report can be required for one property.
- 10 properties require 10.
Twenty attributes might result in a large reporting effort if reports must be created and disseminated manually. Nimble Property provides configurable Daily Flash Reports for individual and groups of hotels, as well as automatic email scheduling.
It also supports automatic STR weekly and monthly forms, as well as GSS formats used by Medallia and Qualtrics. Recurring reporting becomes a repeatable procedure thanks to automation.
Analytics Should Take the Place of Manual Consolidation
When a portfolio expands, leadership need a consolidated perspective.
Nimble Analytics facilitates:
- Analysing a single property
- Hotel group analysis
- Top-performing hotel views
- Budgetary comparisons
- Comparing to the previous year.
- Receivables
- Payables
- Work
- P&L
- The balance sheet
- Tracking of cards and cash
This allows business leaders to assess portfolio performance without manually consolidating spreadsheets.
Create Unique KPIs
Each management firm has its own set of priorities. One may give labour efficiency a lot of attention. Another could give financial flow top priority. Another may prioritize RevPAR, margins, receivables, or departmental performance. Customizable trends and KPI widgets based on COAs, statistics, and other accessible data may be made with Nimble Analytics.
This enables businesses to expand their reporting system without having to set up a manual reporting procedure for each property.
• Don’t wait until the end of the month to comprehend growth.
• Information about the future is necessary for growth decisions.
OTB analytics gives future booking and pickup information for one, three, seven, fourteen, and thirty days.
- Management may compare future booking performance to last year and budget.
- In addition to past financial accounts, this offers another level of visibility.
- AI Assists Accounting Teams in Concentrating on Exceptions.
Automation is most useful when it frees humans from monotonous tasks so they can concentrate on making judgments. Nimble Property’s Monthly AI Financial Analysis Report generates financial insights by utilizing budget, last year, and monthly financial data.
Rather than forcing managers to manually sift through every figure, AI may assist highlight areas that require attention.
• Revenue should rise more quickly with scaling than with administrative complexity.
• Eliminating the accounting personnel is not the aim of automation.
• The goal is to boost the accounting team’s capabilities.
A group that used to spend a lot of time:
- Inputting invoices
- Coding invoices
- Seeking approvals
- Getting payment files ready
- Transactions that match
Making Recurring Reports
• Combining property data can free up more time for:
• Analysis of finances
• Management of cash
• Predicting
• Management of the budget
• Managing exceptions
• Support for operations
Making Strategic Decisions
That is a far superior growth model.
The Novel Hotel Scaling Method
The conventional model was:
More hotels mean more people and more manual work.
What is the Smarter Model?
More hotels plus more automation equals more operational capacity. Nimble Property supports this paradigm with AI-enabled Accounts Payable, mobile workflows, e-payments, bank connectivity, automated reporting, property-level and portfolio analytics, labour intelligence, OTB analytics, and AI financial analysis.
There will always be more transactions as hotels expand. Making sure it doesn’t produce the same amount of manual labour is the goal.
The hotel accounting department with the biggest accounting staff isn’t the most scalable. It is the company that provides its accounting staff with the technologies necessary to handle increasing complexity without losing control.
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