The Club Company Transforms Financial Management with Percipient
Sage Intacct underpins cultural change and expedites growth at leading country club group.
About The Club Company
The Club Company is a premium collection of 18 country clubs, the majority of which are in central and southern England. With a range of facilities available to its members, including championship golf courses, modern health and fitness facilities, swimming pools, tennis courts, spas and accommodation, The Club Company brings together luxury, leisure and community.
With customers at the heart of every centre, The Club Company’s ethos is to deliver amazing experiences, consistent service levels, and new offerings to meet the demands of the modern hospitality consumer.
Driving Change
The Club Company previously used a basic accounting package that relied on spreadsheets, manual intervention, and workarounds. This resulted in lengthy AP processing, inaccuracies and a retrospective view of operations from which to plan.
Against this backdrop, The Club Company required a modern, cloud-based financial management platform which could deliver business insights and empower club managers to improve business performance.
Following a market review, The Club Company selected Sage Intacct for its modern, scalable, and intuitive capabilities. Working with Sage partner Percipient, the hospitality firm went live with the platform in January 2023.
Transformational Value
Two years on from the deployment, Sage Intact has transformed the way in which The Club Company approaches financial management, as Chief Financial Controller, Paul Wells explains:
“Our deployment of Sage Intacct was genuinely seamless. Having gone live following a short implementation, the team couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. Tasks such as posting a journal, navigating to a specific ledger, or reviewing reports were exponentially simpler, and early feedback reflected this sentiment. While most new systems involve time, training and winning hearts and minds as everyone adjusts, the transition to Sage Intacct was so easy.
“Percipient’s hospitality experience, expertise and responsiveness really helped us to get up and running with the system quickly and get value from the outset.”
Autonomy & Intelligence
Sage Intacct now delivers a fully integrated, comprehensive view of every club, including live P&Ls, to provide complete visibility of financial management across The Club Company’s operations.
APIs, via Percipient Cloud Connect, support integration with third-party applications to drive company-wide visibility. A nightly upload from the ordering and invoicing platform, ProcureWizard, to Sage Intacct ensures that data is in the hands of club managers by 9am each day.
“Crucially, the insights it delivers can be understood by business managers across our entire operations, not just finance staff, and gives them the intelligence and autonomy to manage their respective business areas,” Paul adds.
“The finance team are no longer distracted by system demands and manual processes, and the time we have saved can be reinvested into planning, using the insights as opposed to looking for them.”
Transforming the Close Period
Since adopting Sage Intacct, The Club Company has cut processing time by around two-thirds, from 10 days to 3.
“The amount of time we have freed up as a result of using the system has been truly transformative,” Paul continues. “Users are now empowered to access, analyse and apply the data, and because manual re-keying of information has been removed, there is one version of the truth.
“Every club manager has access to real-time insights, and data on the previous day’s performance is available by 9am each morning in readiness for the start of their working day. This autonomy not only allows greater control over budgets and how spending is allocated, but also allows variables to be altered to influence profit.
“They can truly be more proactive concerning costs and react quickly to any changes or shifts in demand. Ultimately, this allows teams to plan in the moment based on what’s happening now, rather than what happened last month.”
Sage Intacct has brought financial management out of the confines of its traditional four walls and into the hands of our club managers and operations. This cultural change has been truly transformative, allowing us to adopt a much more collaborative, intelligence-led approach to planning and performance.
Game-Changing Capabilities
By understanding the impact of different income streams – from coffee shops and bars to golf, spas, and new initiatives such as Padel or the Strike Shack driving range experience – The Club Company has a clear competitive advantage.
The speed of insights available on each means the firm can judge the success of new initiatives, understand where to channel investment and resources, and roll them out to other sites where appropriate.
With every club channelling different cultures, offerings, and promotions, the multi-entity management capabilities within Sage Intacct are a game-changer, as Paul explains.
“Being able to view specific data on each club saves so much time, supporting individual P&Ls while allowing the team potential to consolidate this at a group level. These insights help keep costs in check through rigorous controls. For example, greenkeeping costs might be higher at one site than another. Through better understanding of these, we can stem unnecessary costs and ensure we’re getting the best value from our suppliers,” Paul adds.
Looking ahead, The Club Company plans to leverage the platform’s integration capabilities to understand membership and footfall data better. This ability to refine analysis and planning enables many small incremental changes that converge to drive significant improvements.
Branching Out
“Sage Intacct has brought financial management out of the confines of its traditional four walls and into the hands of our club managers and operations. This cultural change has been truly transformative, allowing us to adopt a much more collaborative, intelligence-led approach to planning and performance. It allows us to drive growth in an intelligent, considered way, and we’re really looking forward to what’s next,” Paul concludes.
Sage Intacct for Hospitality & Leisure
If you would like to learn more about Sage Intacct, our work with The Club Company, or to discuss how we can support your hospitality business, get in touch today or call us on 01606 871332.