McKeever Hotels
McKeever Hotels Digitalises for Growth with Sage Intacct and Percipient
Ireland-based hotel group deploys digital advantage to go the extra mile for its customers.
McKeever Hotels is an award-winning, family-owned hotel group operating a portfolio of hotels across the island of Ireland. As the business outgrew its previous finance system, it needed a scalable cloud platform to automate financial processes, improve reporting, and provide deeper operational insight.
Percipient implemented Sage Intacct, delivering multi-hotel reporting, automated accounts payable workflows, real-time dashboards and enhanced financial visibility, enabling the group to make faster, more informed decisions while supporting long-term growth.
About McKeever Hotels
McKeever Hotels is an award-winning family business which owns and operates five hotels on the Island of Ireland. Started in 1986 as a small restaurant, the company’s ethos and passion remain rooted in delivering an authentic, warm experience and serving the best locally sourced food.
Recent awards include Employer of the Year 2022 at the NI Family Business Awards. This accolade reflects its investment in people, including ongoing training programmes, high-street discounts and perks, and health and wellness incentives.
Its Rosette restaurants, sustainability kudos, and award-winning gardens all support the company’s motto, “We do more”, by going the extra mile for its teams, clients, and customers.
Doing More: A Digital Perspective
Against a backdrop of changing market dynamics and hybrid working models driven by the 2020/2021 pandemic, McKeever embarked on a digital transformation programme. The programme was designed to capitalise on the cloud’s scale and flexibility, underpin new remote working practices, and facilitate integration across the hotel leader’s core systems.
McKeever had outgrown its previous on-premises Sage 50 system, which lacked scale and required an increasing number of workarounds and manual interventions to deliver financial information. In searching for a new, fit-for-purpose system, McKeever evaluated several platforms, including NetSuite, before choosing Sage Intacct.
“Sage Intacct was a no-brainer,” says Victoria Walton, Director of Finance at McKeever Hotels. “The depth of analysis and reporting, combined with its easy-to-use dashboards, was impressive, and precisely what we needed to deliver greater strategic value to the business. And because Sage Intacct is cloud-native, updates are delivered automatically. We knew from the initial demo that the system would scale as we expand, without relying on IT resources.
“The Percipient team were also impressive from the outset, and their experience and expertise from working within the hospitality industry shone through,” she adds.
Sage Intacct was a no-brainer. The depth of analysis and reporting, combined with its easy-to-use dashboards, was impressive and precisely what we needed to deliver greater strategic value to the business.
Intelligent Automation
Now live, McKeever is seeing numerous benefits. Consolidation and greater visibility across hotels provide new levels of performance insight and, as a result, make audits seamless and save huge amounts of time.
“Sage Intacct has essentially breathed new life into our processes,” explains Victoria. “Our operations are more efficient and paperless, and we’ve reduced month-end by multiple days. AP Automation, in particular, has shifted from predominantly manual to almost entirely automated. With a live bank feed, document scanning, and workflow, the process is much more efficient and supports cash flow and supplier relationships. This, in turn, enables better procurement, giving us greater buying power and the ability to negotiate better discounts.
“Sage Intacct’s dashboards are so easy to use and give our Directors a snapshot of the business, or indeed a specific area of interest to drill down into greater detail. The nominal coding means that we can benchmark specific departments and have access to a level of granularity which wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” she explains.
Because the insights are live, we can flag anomalies and act on them promptly, ensuring costly or risky scenarios don’t prevail, and decision-making stays informed, intelligent, and meaningful.
When it comes to tracking demand, if we know that wedding bookings are lower than capacity or expectations, we can launch promotions on corporate hospitality packages to offset this. And in a world where change is ever more present, this capability represents a massive competitive advantage for us.
Painting a Complete Picture
Instead of presenting a one-dimensional set of numbers, Sage Intacct lets McKeever build a story by making all relevant factors and intelligence visible. For example, when comparing Easter periods year on year, calendar months may be irrelevant, as Easter can fall in either March or April. Sage Intacct can handle variability like this and provide a meaningful view without manual adjustments.
Similarly, Sage Intacct allows McKeever to track trends. The team can analyse, for example, typical food and beverage spend per room, apply ranges to monitor whether guests spend as anticipated, and flag when they do not.
“When it comes to tracking demand, if we know that wedding bookings are lower than capacity or expectations, we can launch promotions on corporate hospitality packages to offset this. And in a world where change is ever more present, this capability represents a massive competitive advantage for us,” Victoria comments.
Sustaining an Advantage
On sustainability, McKeever sees great value in Sage Intacct’s statistical journals. As part of a continuous improvement journey, the hotel group is constantly looking at how to minimise the environmental impact of its activities and services, including reducing energy usage by 15%. By tracking energy usage in granular detail through the journals, McKeever Hotels can identify opportunities for change.
The Human Factor
Alongside sustainability, skills are an ongoing challenge for everyone in the hospitality industry and beyond, and is another area in which Sage Intacct brings value, as Victoria explains: “Sage Intacct supports skills agendas in our business, not only through integrating with our time and attendance (T&A) system to monitor skills and hours utilisation, but can map this to areas such as footfall and profitability, so that we can better understand where resources need to be prioritised.”
Our ongoing relationship with Percipient ensures that we continually get the most out of the system. Not only do we have regular check-ins, but their knowledge and creativity in addressing goals or challenges drive so much business value.
Optimising Long-Term Value
“Our ongoing relationship with Percipient ensures that we continually get the most out of the system. We have regular check-ins, and their knowledge and creativity in addressing goals and challenges drive significant business value. We have so much confidence not just in the system, but in the Percipient team supporting the digital transformational journey which accompanies it.”
“The finance function is moving away from an era focused on retrospective accounting and slow, manual spreadsheets,” concludes Victoria. “The modern office of the CFO is very much the beating heart of the business, creating and analysing valuable business insights, sharing these with the business and fostering a culture of collaboration. It has become more project-based and a conduit for strategic value, and we look forward to using the system in more ways. We have absolute confidence that we have the right foundation from which to pursue our plans and optimise value for our customers going forward.”
Sage Intacct Partner for Hospitality
If you would like to learn more about Sage Intacct, our work with McKeever Hotels, or how we can help your hospitality business, please get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.