Villa Plus Reinforces Digital Foundation with Percipient
Sage Intacct underpins modernisation, agility and intelligence at leading villa holiday business.
About Villa Plus
Established in 1986, Villa Plus’s ethos centres on creating a passionate community of customers and villa owners, with relationships built on expertise and trust to deliver exceptional holiday experiences.
With 1,600 properties across 23 destinations, all villas are hand-picked and inspected by the company’s travel experts. Their insider knowledge ensures that beautiful sunsets, enviable locations, top-notch facilities, and the perfect private pool (complete with show-stopping views) are all on the checklist.
Creating an Intelligent View
Villa Plus needed to replace its legacy in-house cashbook system with a modern, cloud-based, out-of-the-box financial management platform as part of a modernisation project. Reflecting Villa Plus’s pan-European property portfolio and divisions, the solution had to support multi-currency, multiple entities, consolidation, and streamline all financial processes for a fully integrated finance operation.
A Breath of Fresh Air
Villa Plus selected Sage Intacct and Percipient from a shortlist of five to support its modernisation. The decision was based on the fact that Sage Intacct was the best system, with capabilities that could easily scale to support the holiday home specialist’s growth, the capacity to deliver fast insights and intelligence, and easy integration with other third-party systems. In parallel, Percipient was chosen based on its credentials, experience, and expertise in the hospitality industry, according to David Keen, Financial Controller, Villa Plus:
“Percipient was a breath of fresh air, instilling tremendous confidence from the outset. The team’s understanding of our industry, down to the nuances and nuts and bolts of the sector and our particular niche within it, combined with a best-practice model, impressed us hugely. Because they have worked with so many other hospitality organisations, they left no stone unturned in helping us navigate the system’s processes and opportunities.
“We actually looked at Sage X3 pre-COVID, but delayed due to the impact of the pandemic on the hospitality sector. Having resurrected the project, the availability of Sage Intacct can only be described as a good slice of fortune, as it’s such a perfect fit for our business.”
Percipient was a breath of fresh air, instilling tremendous confidence from the outset. The team’s understanding of our industry, down to the nuances and nuts and bolts of the sector and our particular niche within it, combined with a best-practice model, impressed us hugely.
Another Dimension
Since going live, Villa Plus’s processes have become much quicker and less manual. Because the team can categorise by different dimensions, personnel can quickly search for a view of a particular area. Depending on what the team needs at a given time, they can search by booking, villa, country, or month to see all relevant details.
By tagging the villa name, destination, booking reference, and departure date, Villa Plus can access, analyse, and report at a very granular, meaningful level, and pin revenue to the relevant dimensions for a better understanding of profitability.
This process used to take a long time, but now it’s as simple as a button click. Because budget holders receive information sooner, they can spend more time examining the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ and, therefore, be more proactive in decision-making.
“Sage Intacct’s dimensions make the reporting so good, and really are easy to set up,” David explains. “We can slice, dice, and make data available to budget holders in a live environment.”
Intelligent Data
“Through using Sage Intacct, we can record high levels of data granularity about each of our properties, which helps us improve both occupancy levels and profitability simultaneously,” he continues. “This capability also allows us to hone in on details which can make a difference, something which is intrinsic to our culture as an organisation.
“This greater depth makes management accounts more comprehensive and instils confidence for more accurate statutory reporting. At the board level, conversations are more productive, as there is always a live, consistent picture of business performance to underpin discussion, and the live data, in turn, means month-end is much quicker. We anticipate the year-end will follow suit.”
Future-Proofing
“Sage Intacct is super-fast, easy to use and intuitive, and its cloud-native functionality aligned with our requirements. I can’t speak highly enough about it; it really is an incredible system,” David concludes.
“Further down the line, we’re looking to capitalise on the APIs within Sage Intacct to expedite integration with other systems. Our booking system, for example, can feed directly into Intacct to support a wider view of the business based on real-time insights.
“The potential for automation in our business is huge, and Sage Intacct, supported by Percipient, gives us as an organisation both the capabilities and the confidence to extract insights, generate meaningful, personalised reports, and run our business in the modern, innovative way we strive for.”
Sage Intacct for Hospitality
If you’d like to learn more about Sage Intacct, our work with Villa Plus, or to discuss how we can help your hospitality business, get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.