01. Introduction

Hotel Investor Apps (HIA) recently sat down with Katie Paolino, Co-founder of Hotel Solutions, LLC, a well-known third-party hospitality bookkeeping firm, to hear about her experience with Hotel Investor Apps, ERP & Accounting Software. 

The College Station, Texas-based firm has been in business for 15 years and has experience serving hundreds of hospitality properties, from select service to full service, boutique, and resort. Co-founder Katie Paolino herself is also well known for her popular YouTube videos that demystify hotel accounting.

As a third-party accounting firm serving many different clients, efficient processes are key for the team in providing timely financials on a weekly and monthly basis. 

“We are passionate about delivering great value to our customers, and streamlining our own processes is part of that. We were really intrigued by HIA’s hospitality ERP and accounting system to see what efficiencies and enhancements our team could gain and pass on to clients.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

Pain Points:

Hotel Solutions had been working in a hotel-specific accounting software already, but their accountants had a number of pain points with the older legacy system that were causing delays and frustrations in their work. These included: 

a) Slow processing speeds and glitches from non-cloud-native software 

b) Decreased productivity due to tedious, manual processes required by the system

c) Lack of graphic visualizations or dashboards to easily communicate status and KPI’s to customers

d.) Additionally, they wanted a software that would help them provide better Accounts Payable functionality to their customers.

02. Implementing HIA: The Hospitality ERP

It was one management company that first asked Hotel Solutions to switch their hotels to HIA’s ERP & Accounting Software. Now, five years into it, Hotel Solutions has many management company customers on HIA, and use it throughout the organization.  

“We have everybody on our team from accounting clerks up to the CEO using HIA. As far as our clients, we have everybody from night auditors, to revenue managers, to CFOs and owners. And everybody in between like the GM’s and AGM’s.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

Resolving the Prior Pain Points

The new HIA ERP & Accounting system was able to resolve the pain points experienced from the prior software.

a.) Fast Processing Speeds

Gone were the slow processing speeds and glitches from non-native cloud software. As a true, born-in-the-cloud ERP software, HIA did not require a plugin to access the internet, there were no delays switching between modules, and reports processed quickly.

“With HIA being all cloud-based – it’s definitely been faster.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

b)  Automations Replacing Tedious, Manual Processes

As an ERP system, HIA comes with built-in automations to streamline routine tasks.  This includes things like automatic error detection, autofill text, streamlined approval processes, and more.

“There are things in HIA that don’t seem huge, but when you’re doing a ton of tasks over and over, they are huge. Like the ability to edit entries to make re-classes, and when you want to re-class something, the ability to copy and paste to duplicate your window – so you can compare things really quickly and easily. Those are all really big deals to our staff accountants.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

c) Dashboards for Improved Communication

HIA’s standard accounting package includes real-time dashboards for at-a-glance information. Dashboards provide both property level and portfolio views, and can also be set up by user role, so each user has instant access to the information most important to their role. These dashboards include visualized KPI’s to easily convey the message behind the data.

“We know for our clients, a big thing is being able to just see a quick snapshot dashboard. They want to see a visual representation of what’s actually happening. Just looking at the numbers can be overwhelming and daunting and so if you can see a pie graph or the bar chart, or just how one hotel is compared to another on a daily basis, that really makes a difference.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

d) Better Accounts Payable functionality

With HIA the Hotel Solutions team was able to streamline and automate previous manual processes, taking advantage of the automated AP and digital payments integrations delivered via tight API connection.

The automated AP integration provides OCR scanning technology to automatically scan, upload, and code invoices. The digital payments integration provides an electronic payment solution right from within the HIA platform. These two integrations helped Hotel Solutions to automate much of their AP processes and get payments in and out faster.

“We had wanted to get payment invoices in faster and payments out quicker – to make it more of an digital process. With HIA’s Factura and Repay integrations we were able to do that.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

03. Beyond Pain Points – Productivity Enhancements

Not only was the Hotel Solutions team able to have their pain points from the prior software addressed, but the additional functionality in HIA significantly enhanced their productivity. Some of the enhancements they experienced included:

a.) More Flexible Daily Reports

In addition to automated PMS and POS imports, HIA’s advanced daily report offers significant flexibility. Some of the flexible features include: 

• The ability for users to synthesize data from multiple reports and formats, if desired, into one daily report.
• The ability to view multiple Daily Report dates at a time. For example if there is an out-of-balance that needs to be balanced, new daily reports can still be worked while that balance is being corrected.
• Daily Report Automations – Automations in the daily report module create daily/monthly journal entries, feed cash management, and feed the stats and operational data into the dashboards. 

“Importing is easier and the daily report is much better. One of the great things about the HIA daily report is that you can work on it on different days. You don’t have to close it the same day and move on. That helps, and also being able to import both your Point of Sale and your PMS system. And then, if you do need to set up, let’s say for example, another report that doesn’t automatically import into HIA on the Daily Report side, you can template it and create the import yourself.  – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

b.) Automatic Report Scheduling

Additionally, HIA’s automation for the scheduling and sending of reports has reduced manual work on behalf of the Hotel Solutions team and been a big win with their clients. 

“For one of our management groups it was a big thing for them to be able to schedule the daily reports (in HIA). All their GM’s have to get their reports and review at the same time each day. It’s a really important aspect.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

c.) Better Scalability and Faster Onboarding of New Hotels

As Hotel Solutions continues to take on new customers and those customers continue to grow their portfolios, the capability to easily onboard new hotels to the system has become even more important. 

“All our clients that we’ve put in HIA, they’ve all grown their portfolios. And so, it’s been a big time saving for us when we need to create a new property, because we can just duplicate templates to add new properties.”– Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

04. Summary

In third-party accounting, efficiency is key as accountants work to support a large client base with weekly and monthly financials. The prior legacy hotel-specific accounting software that Hotel Solutions used had slowed down their staff accountants with outdated processes and slow processing speeds.

By contrast, with HIA’s born-in-the-cloud hospitality ERP software, Hotel Solutions was able to automate and simplify processes, as well as gain new efficiencies. These efficiencies translated into both team productivity and improved client satisfaction, with additional features like visual dashboards, enhanced daily reporting, and streamlined Accounts Payable helping keep client data even more up-to-date and current.  

“Having clients in HIA has made a big difference. HIA helps us provide the financials more efficiently, and in a way that is accessible and understandable to our clients.” – Katie Paolino, Co-founder, Hotel Solutions

To see HIA in action for yourself, Request a Demo today.