As portfolios grow and management teams request more real-time reporting, there can be pressure on the hotel accounting and operations teams to produce more intelligence faster.
So then, how do you deliver on increasing demands without driving up staffing or burning out your team?
Luckily modern technology offers ways to lighten the load with automations. Automations are tools that follow rule-based logic to perform a series of tasks and processes without any human intervention.
Today, these tools can be found in certain ERP and accounting software, transforming previously manual and repetitive tasks into automated activities – saving time while increasing accuracy and consistency. Let’s take a look at what can be automated.
10 Must-have Hotel Accounting Automations
Here are 10 ways that hotel accounting can be streamlined with automations to help your finance teams work more efficiently and accurately:
- Recurring Journal Entries: Reduce manual labor and monotony by having your accounting software automatically create recurring expenses for you. You can set it and forget it, and then easily access and update as needed.
- Report Scheduler: Skip the ‘To Do’ task of running financial reports, downloading, attaching, and sending them out in emails. Instead, use automation to have your financial reports run on a set schedule and then automatically get emailed out as a PDF or excel to decision makers and stakeholders. (For example, some companies enjoy using HIA’s report scheduler to have Daily Reports sent to all their hotel GM’s at the same time every morning.)
- Smart-Match Bank Reconciliation: Bank reconciliation can be a tedious and time-consuming task, so let your software do the grunt work for you. Use a smart-match automation to match bank transactions to journal entries. This significantly reduces the time spent on bank reconciliation, so your team can just handle the flagged entries which are not matching.
- Dynamic AP Approvals: Streamline the Accounts Payable (AP) approval process by setting up an automated dynamic workflow. This means that instead of having a list of approvers who have to approve every invoice (no matter how small it is), you can set rules for who needs to approve by certain criteria, such as by dollar amount. This way the system will dynamically switch the approval workflow based on the rules set up, such as by department, vendor, dollar amount, etc.
- Mobile Push Notifications: Further simplify your hotel AP approvals by using an accounting mobile app that sends push notifications to the approver to notify them to review. A mobile app that allows users to review invoices, approve/deny, and respond with questions can help speed the approval process. (Read how Rainmaker Hospitality uses HIA’s mobile app for AP approvals.)
- Intercompany Transactions: Simplify the intercompany process with automations – after easily splitting an invoice between any number of hotels, let automations create the accounting entries between the hotels, including the “due to” and “due from” entries. This same automation also works for creating “due to” and “due from” entries from corporate books such as for accounts receivable or allocating benefits.
- Report Templates: Whether you are setting up a new hotel chart of accounts, or creating next year’s budget, use existing report formats as a template to save time.
- Role-based Permissions: When setting up new employees in your back-office software, save time with pre-defined user security permissions based on user type or role. Then, easily set up dashboard views, settings, even task lists by duplicating settings from another employee of a similar role.
- PMS Integration: If you aren’t using a hotel-specific accounting software yet, this automation alone can save hours of manual data entry every day. Additionally, when your system automatically imports daily revenue, you reduce errors and get more accurate data for analysis and financial reports. (Tip: Look for a software, like HIA, that also automatically creates the corresponding journal entries for the PMS revenue.)
- Payroll Data Integration: Don’t manually key in payroll expenses or export and import csv files. With payroll integrated into your accounting software, data is imported automatically and your payroll journal entries are automatically created for you.
Summary
When looking for automations in hotel accounting, no system does more to streamline processes, increase accuracy, and boost efficiency than Hotel Investor Apps (HIA) with its ERP technology. Automations such as those listed above simplify processes and save customers hours per day, all while providing greater financial visibility.
If you are ready to see how automations can make your financial management more effective, schedule a demo to see why hotel management companies keep making the switch to HIA.
Director of Marketing at HIA
Elisa Fritsch, Director of Marketing at HIA, contributes 15 years of diverse sales and marketing experience from corporate to start-up environments. In the hospitality sector, she managed B2B marketing for notable companies like Choice Hotels International and Kalibri Labs. At HIA, Elisa focuses on inbound and content marketing, leveraging her industry knowledge to drive growth.
