By Mansley Drives Growth with Percipient
Serviced luxury apartments business supercharges automation and saves 45% in processing time with Sage Intacct.
About By Mansley
By Mansley is an Edinburgh-based hospitality company operating serviced apartments in London, Edinburgh, Inverness, Cheltenham and York. Established in the 1960s, By Mansley’s journey started with a Mayfair apartment, before expanding over the years into other flagship city locations.
A Multi-Entity Operation
By Mansley operates five companies as separate entities, which the team previously had to consolidate accounts for manually. Data duplication and manual re-keying of information meant that this process was time consuming and open to errors.
Investing in Automation
Business growth, expedited by the opening of its York boutique accommodation at the beginning of 2024, meant that By Mansley either needed to expand its finance team, or invest in increased automation.
By Mansley’s Chief Operating Officer, Colin Stone explains: “We wanted to supercharge people’s skills and ensure our systems were modern and scalable. We therefore opted for the “greater automation” option and looked to replace our Sage 50 system with more modern, intelligent and relevant capabilities.
“Having worked with Sage for many years, we had a degree of trust and familiarity that we saw huge advantage in capitalising on. We looked at several other systems as part of our RFP, but Sage Intacct was without doubt, the best solution.”
Having gone live in April 2022 By Mansley quickly saw value, as Colin explains: “Setting up different dimensions was key in ensuring we could access the right information. Locations, seasonality, durations and location-specific insights are all vital metrics in our success, and understanding these fully means we are able to make the best decisions.”
Percipient demonstrated an authenticity and openness from day one and its consultants were both professional and conscientious throughout. The team members clearly demonstrated a passion for working for Percipient, and were always there to help steer us in the right direction, with nothing too much trouble.
Embracing a New Mindset
As well as being highly intuitive and easy to use, Sage Intacct has revolutionised By Mansley’s Accounts Payable (AP). Receivables and bank requisition processes are also so much improved. “These have always been a bit of a pain point as we incur a lot of low value transactions,” Colin remarks. “Sage Intacct now manages these seamlessly – we don’t need to bend the system to fit our processes. And the benefits of Sage Intacct don’t stop there.
“Performance cards great fun to play with. We’ve fully integrated our property management system (PMS) which gives us even more statistics. Because the system is so simple to work with it encourages report building which in turn, helps staff to play with different models and scenarios.”
Game-Changing Performance
Non-finance people from across By Mansley’s operations use these reporting capabilities to instil agility and intelligence in their day-to-day planning. Department heads can quickly understand the performance of their entity on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to track performance comprehensively.
Multi-dimensions across all groups, from budget analysis to planning, allow greater depth and granularity in the way decisions are made. Department heads can see if say, linen costs or energy usage are higher than they should be so that anomalies can be corrected, thus stemming any cash leaks.
Perpetually Modern
“Sage Intacct’s cloud infrastructure not only comes with ease of deployment but four releases each year which as a team, we look forward to. Percipient keeps us posted on what’s coming up so that we can prepare and take maximum advantage of new features which everyone really likes and looks forward to, whether it’s a “fix” for an issue or new ways of dealing with a particular area.”
The Future
The level of automation By Mansley now experiences really is saving so much time. Pre Intacct, its month end absorbed around 14 days compared to one and a half currently, which equates to a 45% time-saving. This means the team can make better use of resources and focus on the company’s growth journey, very much applying an intelligent lens to future planning.
The Percipient Edge
“Percipient demonstrated an authenticity and openness from day one and its consultants were both professional and conscientious throughout. The team members clearly demonstrated a passion for working for Percipient, and were always there to help steer us in the right direction, with nothing too much trouble.
“Our ethos is very much focused on the fusion of family values, service and an innovative outlook. And life is just better when you work with nice people who share your values.”
Award-Winning Sage Intacct Partner
If you would like to learn about Sage Intacct, our work with By Mansley, or to discuss how we can help your hospitality business, get in touch today or call us on 01606 871332.
