01. Introduction
Hotel Investor Apps (HIA) recently sat down with Steve Kirkland, Vice President of Finance for Presidian Hospitality, to hear about Presidian Hospitality’s experience with one of HIA’s newest integrations, Velixo, which connects the HIA platform to Excel.
Presidian Hospitality, a Texas based and focused hotel management company with a roughly 15 hotel portfolio, was an early adopter of Hotel Investor Apps ERP & Accounting software with almost 7 years on the platform, and they are always looking for ways to enhance their financial management tool stack.
“As soon as I heard about HIA’s integration for Excel, I knew it would be a win for us. I had worked with an earlier version Excel integration at a prior firm, and I knew the potential of directly connecting an ERP finance platform to Excel.” – Steve Kirkland, Vice President of Finance, Presidian Hospitality
How Does the Integration Work?
The Velixo integration creates an advanced, two-way connection between Hotel Investor Apps ERP & Accounting system and Excel. The integration is private and direct, enabling users to pull live data from HIA into Excel, and then write back the updated data from Excel into HIA’s system.
The connection is by an advanced two-way API, the most modern and direct integration type, removing potential points of failure like intermediate servers and allowing for the retrieval of data at a greater frequency than other connection types.
Objectives of the Integration
The goal for Presidian Hospitality in adding the integration was to enhance their reporting capabilities in multiple areas – especially to allow for more flexibility in the format of their financial statements, like P&Ls, Budgeting, and Forecasting, across their portfolio.
They were also interested in setting up a system that would help speed onboarding of new hotel General Managers and empower their General Managers to more frequently submit forecasts.
02. Results
Presidian Hospitality has embraced HIA’s Velixo integration, and in the 7 months since they added it, are already seeing impressive results. With Steve Kirkland, VP of Finance, as the lead product champion, the Velixo / Excel integrationis now used by roughly 20 users on the team including the corporate accountants and general managers. Results from the integration so far include:
Result #1: More Flexible Reporting
With a diverse management portfolio ranging from select service hotels to large, full service resorts with banquet spaces, Presidian Hospitality’s financial statements serve multiple property types. The resort financial statements are necessarily more complex to include more departments and account codes.
With Velixo, the team was able to streamline their cross-portfolio analysis reporting with advanced departmental filters, as well as make the select service property reporting more concise.
Additionally, having the financial statements in Velixo means they can quickly onboard and set up new hotels in the portfolio.
Estancia Del Norte, San Antonio, TX, managed by Presidian Hospitality
Result #2: Enhanced Forecasting
At Presidian Hospitality, each General Manager is responsible for creating and submitting a 2x/month forecast, allowing for proactive property expense planning.
The forecasting process has now been more simplified and automated with the connection for Excel as now with the click of a button, GM’s can update their Year to Date Forecast with Actuals from HIA for the prior month.
“HIA’s Velixo integration has been really vital in helping us make forecasting more approachable, more automated, and less time consuming for our General Managers.” – Steve Kirkland, Vice President of Finance, Presidian Hospitality
Staybridge Suites Downtown, San Antonio, TX, managed by Presidian Hospitality
Result #3: Streamlined Budgeting
With Budgeting, the corporate finance team at Presidian provides a property-specific budget template for each of their General Managers, who can then adjust any outlying items. The process of creating these budgets used to take 3 weeks, but now with the templates set up in Velixo / Excel, they can be done at the switch of a dropdown.
Additionally, with the write-back capability, the budget updates can be synched back into HIA for use as comparisons in financial statements. When asked what his favorite feature was in HIA’s Velixo integration, Steve Kirkland stated that it was definitely the write-back capability, which is accomplished simply with a click of the “Perform Writeback” button.
“Now that we have it set up in HIA’s Velixo integration, our budgeting process this year is smoother than it has ever been historically.” – Steve Kirkland, Vice President of Finance, Presidian Hospitality
TownePlace Suites Universal City, Selma, TX; managed by Presidian Hospitality
Result # 4: More Easily Run Comparisons
Before using HIA’s Velixo integration for Excel, putting together comparison reports on hotel performance for a given year versus other years could be a very involved process. For example, if management asked for a property’s Year to Date (YTD) performance comparison against other years.
Now with their Budgets & Forecasts in Velixo / Excel synched to the HIA system, Presidian has set it up for fast flex comparisons, such as YTD versus 2023, or 2022, or 2019, etc. This way a time period can be compared against different years/periods at the click of a button. This streamlined process provides significant time savings as well as business insights.
La Posada Hotel, Laredo, TX, managed by Presidian Hospitality
03. Conclusion & Impact
The Presidian Hospitality team has seen significant results from HIA’s integration for Excel, including enhanced reporting, forecasting, and budgeting, as well as the ability to more easily run comparisons. Since its adoption, their focus has been on P&Ls, Budgeting, and Forecasting, but they also see possibilities for its application in other areas, such as a Cash Variance reporting and Journal Entries with changes.
“HIA’s integration for Excel has given us a lot more flexibility in our reporting, and we’re excited about all it can do.” – Steve Kirkland, Vice President of Finance, Presidian Hospitality
Chip Fritsch, Chief Operating Officer for Hotel Investor Apps, sums it up, “We know that if there is one tool that hotel finance teams really love, it is Excel, so we have embraced it. We’re glad to offer this tool that can make our customers’ reporting even more robust while maintaining the up-to-date accuracy from our ERP system.”
For more information on HIA’s integration with Excel, powered by Velixo, read “Introducing Velixo” or watch this 1-minute video “5 Benefits of an Excel Data-Feed.”
