The Other House Looks to Future Growth with Sage Intacct Planning and Percipient
Unique hospitality scale-up deploys Sage Intacct Planning to reinforce budgeting and forecasting to enhance strategy and expedite performance.
About The Other House
The Other House is a residents’ club combining apartment-style living with hotel-style services.
A new concept, The Other House brings a hotel, members’ club and private residences into a residents’ club, catering for long and short stays. With its first property in South Kensington, the second location debuts in Covent Garden imminently, and more locations are set to follow in the coming years.
Focused on meeting the unique needs of the modern traveller, and an ethos on creating memorable experiences, The Other House offers interior-designed club flats, beautiful spaces to eat and drink, and exclusive access to its private club.
Scaling for Success
Having deployed Sage Intacct fully in July 2022, The Other House sees digital as a crucial aspect of its business and a huge source of competitive advantage.
The intelligence generated through using Sage Intacct means that The Other House can view pretty much anything via an easy-to-navigate dashboard, daily, weekly, monthly, or by any other configuration to distil key data in minutes rather than days.
Building on this, The Other House recently deployed Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) for out-of-the-box budgeting, forecasting, and planning capabilities. Fully integrated with Sage Intacct, SIP complements and amplifies the core capabilities within Sage Intacct, to facilitate one, meaningful, intelligent version of the truth, enabling confidence, control, and collaboration.
Fully Integrated Intelligence
According to The Other House’s Director of Operations Finance, Ashley Slinger, the overarching benefit of SIP is that as well as being fully integrated with Sage Intacct, it is intuitive and easy to use, with deep analysis and intelligence:
“The seamless integration adds robustness to our financials, budgeting and planning, as the two-way flow of information between Sage Intacct and SIP intuitively maps budgets, drivers, and forecasts dynamically to create the most accurate, up-to-date view of the business.
“The fact that it links smoothly, mapping budgets and forecasts to actuals, makes our planning both informed and easy. Forecasts are available weekly, monthly or on a rolling basis according to need or preference, and these can be adjusted as events or dynamics change. Drivers can be set up against all cost bases, from concierge services to laundry or housekeeping to drive planning and ensure costs are correct.
“This comprehensive, live, view, fosters collaboration in the budgeting process, empowering heads of departments as they can feed into the budget process to create a forecast which closely aligns with performance, market dynamics, variables and intelligence. And crucially, this means that as soon as we complete month end, the system automatically generates a forecast for the next quarter and gives an indication as to where our year-end will land.
“Our monthly meetings review the insights from SIP, and we can make an immediate review of performance based on actuals, and forecasts for the subsequent quarter. This degree of visibility not only helps us to plan but cements our relationship with stakeholders as we can be transparent about precisely where the business is at any given point.”
Strategically, we can see what impact certain decisions have on business goals, while operationally, we can re-route resources into those areas which show peaks in demand. Through knowing which levers to pull, staffing can be designed appropriately to maximise both efficiency and the customer experience (CX).
Deeper Analysis
A key area for The Other House is the proportion of revenue which comes via online travel agencies (OTAs). Leveraging forecasts from The Other House’s revenue management system, SIP can look at which channels each booking comes from a thorough analysis of different OTAs. This in turn provides an understanding of occupancy rate margins and profitability, as Ashley explains:
“While any system will provide information on “heads in beds” SIP can tell us the cost and profitability associated with these numbers. “Heads in beds” is not necessarily the right metric if those heads aren’t profitable, using the system, we can now ensure the optimum balance of OTA bookings to support marketing and brand presence, and complement where necessary, but channel the majority of planning into securing higher value bookings.”
Strategic Conversations
This ability to use this level of insight to underpin strategic, evidence-based conversations and make better business decisions when they need to be made, not only speeds up but brings unprecedented levels of confidence.
“Strategically, we can see what impact certain decisions have on business goals, while operationally, we can re-route resources into those areas which show peaks in demand. Through knowing which levers to pull, staffing can be designed appropriately to maximise both efficiency and the customer experience (CX),” Ashley adds.
Scenario Planning
The live insights generated by the system underpin revenue meetings and The Other House typically runs numerous scenarios to evaluate which levers to turn to optimise performance and profitability. Crucially these what-if scenarios can be merged with the working budget and flow seamlessly back into Sage Intacct, so interdependencies, and their respective influence on P&L and cashflow, can be assessed to better support strategy.
“Our next property launch will be Covent Garden in 2025, and using SIP, we have much more accurate, detailed insights from which to refine planning,” Ashley explains. “SIP reinforces the planning process and gives us confidence that we’ll see the return on the energies and investment being made in the best way.”
The team at Percipient has been invaluable throughout this project. Not only have we benefitted from the consistency of the same team responsible for our Sage Intacct deployment, but they’ve been committed, dedicated and tenacious in ensuring SIP delivers for us.
Delivering More
“The team at Percipient has been invaluable throughout this project. Not only have we benefitted from the consistency of the same team responsible for our Sage Intacct deployment, but they’ve been committed, dedicated and tenacious in ensuring SIP delivers for us. Their understanding of our business model, which is fairly unusual within the hospitality space, and friendly, flexible approach to ensuring everything is right, ensured a seamless go-live. As we continue to get to grips with the solution they’re always on hand to support us and provide solutions to any challenges we come up against.
“Ultimately, the live intelligence and insights on all aspects of our business which Sage Intacct and SIP converge to deliver, give us truly end-to-end financials, budgeting, forecasting and planning. The detail and dashboard-based insights mean we have unprecedented levels of depth and detail on every number, which allows us to plan better, refine strategy and scale in the best way possible.”
Multi-Award-Winning Sage Intacct Partner
If you’d like to learn more about Sage Intacct Planning and our work with The Other House, or if you’d like to discuss the benefits of Sage Intacct for your business, please get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.