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.
About McKeever Hotels
McKeever Hotels is an award-winning family business which owns and operates five hotels on the Island of Ireland. Having started in 1986 as a small restaurant, the company’s ethos and passions remain rooted in delivering an authentic and warm experience, and serving the very best in locally sourced food.
Recent awards include Employer of the Year 2022 at the NI Family Business Awards, an accolade which is a testament to its investment in people, including ongoing training programmes, high street discounts and perks, and health and wellness incentives.
Its Rosette restaurants, accolades for sustainability, and award-winning gardens, all converge to support the company’s motto of “We do more” in the name of going the extra mile for its teams, clients, and customers.
Sage Intacct was a no-brainer. The depth of analysis and reporting combined with its easy-to-use dashboards were impressive, and precisely what we needed to deliver greater strategic value to the business.
Doing More: A Digital Perspective
Against a backdrop of changing market dynamics and hybrid working models as dictated by the pandemic in 2020/2021, McKeever embarked upon a digital transformation programme. The programme was designed to capitalise on the scale and flexibility afforded by the cloud, underpin new remote working practices, and facilitate integration across the hotel leader’s core systems.
McKeever had outgrown its previous Sage 50 system, which not only was on-premise, and therefore lacked scale, but required an increasing amount of workarounds and manual intervention to deliver financial information. In searching for a new, fit-for-purpose system, McKeever looked at several platforms, including NetSuite, before deciding on Sage Intacct.
“Sage Intacct was a no-brainer,” comments Victoria Walton, Director of Finance, McKeever Hotels. “The depth of analysis and reporting combined with its easy-to-use dashboards were 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 right from the initial demo that the system would scale to support us as we expand, without needing to rely on IT resources to facilitate.
“The Percipient team were also incredibly impressive from the outset, and their experience and expertise from working within the hospitality industry shone through,” she adds.
Intelligent Automation
Now live, McKeever is seeing a plethora of benefits. Consolidation and greater visibility across each hotel bring new levels of insight and understanding of performance, and as a result, audits are seamless, saving huge amounts of time.
“Sage Intacct has essentially taken the air out of our processes,” explains Victoria. “Our operations are so more efficient, paperless and we’ve reduced month end by multiple days.
“AP Automation in particular has been transformed from being predominantly manual to an almost entirely automated part of our operations. As well as a live bank feed, document scanning and workflow, the process is so much more efficient, which supports cash flow as well as supplier relationships. This in turn enables better procurement, giving us more buying power and control 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 simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” she explains.
Because the insights are live, any anomalies can be flagged and acted upon promptly, ensuring that costly or risky scenarios are not allowed to prevail and that decision-making is 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 allows McKeever to build a story based on the visibility of all relevant factors and intelligence. For example, when comparing Easter periods year on year, using calendar months may be irrelevant as it can fall into either March or April. Sage Intacct can allow for variability like this and provide a meaningful view without having to make manual adjustments.
Similarly, Sage Intacct allows McKeever to track trends. The team can analyse, for example, typical food and beverage spend per room, and apply ranges to monitor the extent to which 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
When it comes to sustainability, McKeever is seeing a great deal of value in Sage Intacct’s statistical journals. As part of a journey of continuous improvement, the hotel group is constantly looking at how the impact of its activities and services on the environment can be minimised, one area of which is to reduce energy usage by 15%. Through tracking energy usage in granular detail via the journals, McKeever Hotels can identify potential 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. Not only do we have regular check-ins, but their knowledge and creativity in addressing goals or challenges drive so much 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 of strategic value, and in line with this, we are looking forward to utilising 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.