Tame Top 5 Manual Consolidations With Hotel Management ERP Software

The challenges created by today's financial consolidation process are costing hospitality companies like yours countless hours per month. Successful accounting and finance teams rely on hotel management ERP software to automate these complex processes.

It's time to tame all the manual consolidations required by multi-location hotels, restaurants, and resorts with decentralized payables, inter-entity transactions, multiple currencies, and global consolidations. Here are the Top 5 challenges you can solve with the right hotel management ERP software.

Top 5 hospitality corporate consolidation challenges:

1. 1. 1. Maintaining multiple systems and processes
      2. No clear control or workflows
      3. Inefficient, error-prone Excel reporting
      4. No visibility across entities
      5. Difficult to scale and grow the business strategically

If you're like most companies, you're using something similar to these 4 steps in your the multi-entity hospitality company consolidation process if you're not using a system like Sage Intacct hospitality software automation:

1. Complex calendars are created with target dates for each business unit to close their books and roll up their results to the corporate accounting department.
2. Prior to adopting hotel management ERP software like Sage Intacct hospitality software, the corporate accounting department usually receives the business units' close results through email or in a shared directory.  These offline submissions often require a degree of manual manipulation to normalize the disparate business units' inputs using unified accounting policies and account grouping structures. This procedure is ripe for input and keying errors as a result of the duplicate data entry from each individual entity.
3. Without the use of hospitality software in the cloud, corporate hospitality accounting teams are required to set-up a consolidation entity inside the financial reporting system to house the consolidation and elimination journal entries.  However, many others continue to rely on a simple spreadsheet for this purpose.  Whether it's journal entries or separate columns and/or rows, the inter-company activities and the investment/equity accounts get eliminated, and the books for any acquisition related balances (e.g. goodwill) adjusted.
4. The consolidated accounts are manipulated and put into a financial reporting framework.

Eliminate errors and improve data integrity

Cloud hotel management software, like Sage Intacct, eliminates errors and preserves financial reporting integrity by automating checks and balances and account reconciliations.  In a recent study by Financial Executives Research Foundation and Robert Half, more than 57% of companies manually reconcile accounts. Many difficult challenges arise when late entries or other adjustments get posted and this process is repeated.

More than 57% of companies manually reconcile accounts.

Stop relying on the old ways and get strategic

It's indisputable that the old way of preparing a consolidation no longer works, is showing extreme inefficiency, and comes with greater risk. If your reliance on spreadsheets and manual procedures is what holds back your team from playing greater strategic roles in their organizations, or your team is clinging to the manual processes and spreadsheets of the past for comfort, it’s important that everyone recognizes that approaches to financial consolidation have advanced significantly in recent years.

There is a better way to design and architect your consolidation process that results in constant consolidations taking place automatically, enabling real-time financial and operational visibility. Get started on your journey to automated consolidation today.

Contact Equation Technologies to learn how Sage Intacct helps streamline business processes.

Another version of this blog was posted on April 22, 2019 - Top 5 Hospitality Company Corporate Consolidation Challenges