Percipient looks at how the cloud is bringing hotel finance out of the back office, to deliver tangible value across the entire organisation, with a complete view of multi-entity performance.
Having weathered the storms of the last two years, the hotel industry has its sights firmly set on recovery, with optimism returning that 2022 could be the year of a much-needed rebound for the sector.
In light of this, never has it been more important for hotels to achieve the levels of control and agility needed to stand firm in the face of challenges and disruption, with robust financial management a core component of this much-needed business resilience. As such, we’re seeing more hotel businesses looking to their finance function for help. With finance departments well-placed to provide the insight needed to underpin fast, effective decision-making across the business.
As more hotels look to invest in technology, cloud is rapidly becoming the go-to deployment approach, with the flexibility and efficiency needed to streamline and accelerate the end-to-end finance function for the benefit of the entire organisation.
So, what is it about the cloud that makes it such an appealing prospect for financial management and what can hotel businesses hope to achieve by moving their financials to the cloud?
Easier to Manage
With cloud-based financials, it’s not only easier to deploy but easier to manage too. There’s no need to devote large amounts of in-house resource to manage the day-to-day running of the system, with IT resources instead being used to add real strategic value elsewhere in the organisation.
Upgrades and updates are all handled remotely. Managed by the solution provider, doing away with costly, disruptive and time-consuming downtime and ensuring you’re always operating with the most up-to-date version of the software.
With cyber security posing a threat to the hotel industry, organisations can take comfort in the fact that the level of security that’s guaranteed with a cloud-based solution far outperforms any security measures that the majority of hotel businesses have on-premise or on-site. And, vitally, the ROI is often rapid, with ultimately fewer IT overheads and ongoing costs on moving to the cloud.
Platform for Growth
Another benefit of cloud-based solutions is the ability to scale and flex in-line with changing business requirements. So, whether your organisation is growing geographically, diversifying the services it provides, or acquiring new businesses, a cloud-based financial management solution can easily accommodate these changes.
Such solutions are built for growth, quickly and easily onboarding new entities and handling the seasonal variations in demand that are standard in the hospitality industry. What’s guaranteed is that your financial management systems won’t hold you back, enabling rather than stifling your growth potential.
Comprehensive Visibility
Perhaps most importantly, the right cloud-based financial management solutions create a truly unified business, seamlessly joining together multiple entities, sites and business divisions.
There’s no longer any need to manually amalgamate financial information from across the organisation, a process that’s both time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, information is automatically pulled together from right across the business, truly supporting multi-location and multi-property businesses.
There’s no compromise to the independence or autonomy of individual sites either, with staff able to enter or view information regarding specific properties and locations without being privy to the information provided by other sites. What this facilitates is a comprehensive, up-to-date view of the entire organisation, with multi-dimensional general ledger and easy-to-use reporting tools simplifying reporting structures as well.
The automatic consolidation of reports in a single, centralised system, able to deal with a multitude of regional regulatory requirements and multiple currencies, paves the way for huge reductions in close times and the ability to on-board new additions to the organisation quickly and easily.
Create an Agile, Resilient Business
Ultimately, this comprehensive visibility goes beyond the confines of the traditional back office finance function, delivering the levels of business insight on which rapid, robust decision-making is based.
This is where a good cloud-based financial management solution comes into its own. Delivering flexibility of deployment in combination with the comprehensive financial visibility required to build a truly agile, resilient hotel business. The ability to make decisions based on accurate, up-to-date business information should not be underestimated, allowing your business to respond to changing market dynamics, fluctuating demand and ever-increasing customer expectations.
Without the flexibility and insight that such systems deliver, hotel businesses are often held back by the very systems designed to help them grow. By bringing finance out of the back-office, heading to the cloud to create a truly unified organisation, it’s possible to keep a closer eye on multi-entity performance, using the information available to build a business that’s able to stand firm in the face of disruption.
With the right business-wide information and insight delivered to the right people, what results is a resilient business, one with the ability to achieve dynamic, strategic growth based on accurate financial information at every turn.
As the industry continues to emerge from the fog of the global pandemic, creating a unified organisation that’s able to respond quickly and effectively to changing demands must be at the top of the priority list, heading cloud-ward in the pursuit of optimum business efficiency and laying the solid foundations for future growth.
Move Your Back Office to the Cloud
We help hospitality businesses to get the most out of their back office solutions. Using the latest cloud technology, our finance solutions enable you to seamlessly integrate with your existing systems to give you one complete view of your operations.
Get in touch to find out how our cloud-based finance solutions can help your business, or register your interest for one of our coffee break demos.