How Hospitality Survives in 2020

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These are completely unprecedented times and with stay-at-home orders across the nation, hospitality companies are facing new challenges to stay relevant. The overall hospitality industry has taken a huge hit in business and is facing sales that aren’t enough to cover their fixed costs. With that in mind, hospitality companies’ goals for the next six months focus on maximizing profit margins for delivery, take out, new programs that can be mailed out, and virtual programs. Many of these offerings can be completely new to the business making it a significant challenge. Given this, what are a few ways to meet this challenge and bring customers back to your business?

Offering Discounts:

Many of your customers are stuck at home therefore you aren’t losing them to a competitor but rather to no decision or rather lack of opportunity. With that in mind, offering a discount will encourage your customers to call in order even if they aren’t able to eat at your restaurant. With many people out of jobs, or on limited hours a discount could also put your business back into their budget.

New Offering for Stay-at-Home Customers:

Hospitality companies that relied on their customers to be able to come into their place of business such as gyms, or breweries are looking for ways to still engage and be relevant. The big question here is what can you offer to customers virtually? For example, a Pure Barre studio could offer classes virtually- allowing them to still collect their monthly memberships and help customers remain connected. Breweries can offer a drive-through option where customers can still pick up their weekly drink of choice. Local boutiques can offer delivery within a certain radius of their store with virtual shopping appointments.

New Services at Lower Prices:

The economic landscape has drastically changed in the past month leaving many households with a more limited budget for fun or extras. Hospitality has always been in the extra category, therefore, taking a look at what your previous cost as per customer and where ideally you think your customer could afford to be is a huge factor in surviving. Restaurants alone can offer new to-go options that are more cost-effective on their end for ingredients, and eliminate actually cooking them by offering ready to cook options. These options could be family-style and slightly lower than their typical menu. For hotels offering a post-pandemic package that includes a resort credit or is a slashed room rate can entice customers to return later this year even if they won’t have the same travel budget.

The overall key for hospitality companies to survive and thrive is to look at ways they can reinvent themselves to match the new landscape.

At rinehimerbaker, we provide leading cloud-based technology packages as well as best-in-class outsourced accounting to hospitality companies. If you are struggling to keep up with your business from home reach out to our team to see how we can help you change the dynamic and put you back on top.

 


1000 North Case Study

Hospitality Finance Departments Save Big with Cloud ERP Solution

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Hospitality Finance departments have been able to save money, and time by moving their ERP solution to the cloud. The cloud gives finance employees access anywhere anytime with easy to create reports that help cut close times every month. Below you will find examples of how companies have saved big by moving to the cloud. If you want to find out more about how they were able to get these results sign up for our webinar on October 30th at 1 pm Eastern.

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hospitality finance


Cloud Solutions

Hospitality Companies Score a Hole-In-One with Cloud Solutions

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Hospitality companies can grow quickly with new locations, and new business lines (such as an additional bar, restaurant, golf lessons department, etc). With quick growth companies who aren’t using the best software can feel growing pains and create their own automation gap unknowingly. Below we review what the top pain points are and where the automation gap is created. At the end we discuss what the best steps are to eliminate your growing pains and get rid of the manual work through cloud solutions.  

 

Hospitality Company Growing Pains 

Growing pains can be sometimes be hard to distinguish because you find them becoming an accepted part of your day-to-day operations. Only when you start looking at best practices and how competitors are operating do you realize you are behind the curve in technology that gives time back to your organization. Top growing paints for hospitality companies are: 

  • Less time to focus on financials therefore you are taking shortcuts which is creating errors 
  • Your current team has a lack of finance or accounting knowledge leading to more time trying to figure out how to do basic bookkeeping vs. Leading the company to growth 
  • Multiple locations or lines of business (such as a country club with different entities or a franchise with 3 locations) 
  • Currently you have a lack of visibility and control into the total company 
  • Have a need for consolidated reporting that gives insight into your vendors across all business lines or locations 
  •  

Where the Automation Gap can be Created for Hospitality Companies  

The automation gap is created in hospitality companies when their growth is faster than their current software solutions can scale. This leads to manual processes for your team and creating hours of additional work. While at first this process many seem simple such as signing 5 checks a week, by the time you get to 40 checks a week you are now taking up hours a month on something that could be automated. Another example is timesheets. When you start out with one business area or location you may have four people which is easy to do manually. You oversee this team directly and can validate they worked the hours they have written down. By the time you have 35 employees you are looking at additions to your total business, more on your plate taking you out of the day and day, and managers that are now in charge of payroll. By leaving this process on paper and manual you will be prone to errors as well as inaccuracies because you aren’t there to know exactly what time everyone worked. This is the automation gap.  

 

If you have said yes that is an opportunity in my company, yes I face that same difficulty every week, then we have a few solutions that will work for you. Read through the chart below to identify where your company falls, and then fill out the form below to talk with our team.  

 

Current Accounting Situation 
  • Owner Operated 
  • Currently don’t understand your books 
  • None to limited reporting  
  • Results take 6-8 weeks to get 
  • Budget doesn’t allow to hire a controller 
  • Searching for professional advice 
  • Currently have an accounting staff  
  • Your team isn’t efficient because of manual processes that are time consuming 
  • 1-2 people currently working on your books 
  • Reports are error prone 
  • Your accounting team is new and could use guidance on how to purchase software 
  • Writing checks 
  • Complying special reporting 
  • You can’t access your data anywhere 
Solutions  Find an Accounting Solutions Firm that has an experienced team that can advise on new technologies, implement best practices, and lead your company to growth.  

They will provide: 

  • Real Insight into your operations  
  • Have ME close in 10 or less days a month 
  • Establish and provide a monthly report package 
  • Advice from a team that works with top companies in the hospitality industry 
 Find an Accounting Software partner that can implement a cloud-based solution that eliminates manual processes, and provides data faster 

 

They will provide: 

  • A list of cloud-based technologies that all integrate together to create a best-in-class solution specific to your company 
  • Enhanced insights and analytics 
  • Vendor insight for all locations or businesses 
  • Dashboards specific to real time data you need 

 


Franchise Management

Franchise Management with Sage Intacct

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Sage Intacct is the leading cloud-based ERP solution for franchise management. Franchise owners can easily manage multiple locations, access in real time data, and gain insights into each location’s performance without sacrificing roll-up reporting capabilities. All of this is made possible by Intacct’s best-in-class multi-entity management / consolidation capabilities and open API. Intacct relieves business owners of IT worries, all while eliminating cumbersome consolidations and manual reporting. Franchise finance and accounting teams can become proactive team players by refocusing their time on high value analytic tasks. Below are a few recommendations of how Sage Intacct can provide the boost your franchise’s finance team has been looking for:

Multi Location Reporting

Managing multiple entities or locations can be overwhelming with the wrong software. With Sage Intacct you can quickly see each individual location’s financial data, as well as the financial health of your entire franchise. The high configurability of Intacct makes roll up reporting for the executive team a breeze. Now decision makes can quickly analyze their total business with real-time data and seize time sensitive opportunities, both on the franchise and individual store levels.

Secure, Granular Permissions

Sage Intacct’s user permissions allow you to easily assign and update user permissions, giving each person access to only the location(s), reports, and financial data necessary to their role within your organization. With their own login, managers can see their store(s) financial information without sacrificing the security of other franchise financial data or them having to wait to receive manual reports from the corporate finance team. Now franchises can structure their accounting system to fit their organizational structure, instead of modifying employees’ roles to fit the accounting system’s capabilities.

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Streamlined Tech Stack

Sage Intacct has a fully open API for seamlessly connection to your franchises’ other systems, such as your POS, HR management, and business intelligence software. Being able to connect all of your business tools to Sage Intacct means you can now pull data from disparate systems into one place for expedited review. Imagine having a dashboard showing sales from your POS, headcount from your HR system, and comparative report showing revenue by headcount across all your locations.

Hassle Free Expansion

Adding a new store location in Intacct can be done in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. Intacct was designed for rapidly expanding businesses, meaning your new franchise location or holding company can be added quickly without any IT resources or reconfiguration of existing locations.

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Benchmarking and KPI’s

Benchmarking is made easier with Sage Intacct’s ability to consolidate and report information. Business owners can quickly see how each location is performing against their KPI’s and against other locations. This means owners and their management team can quickly identify performance issues. Also, through

Sage Intacct’s dashboards management can dive deeper into the numbers and understand the drivers of each locations’ performance.

Negotiate Pricing

Sage Intacct’s numerous reporting tools allow your team to tailor reports that slice and dice data to your company’s individual needs. With this ability, data can easily be analyzed to show how much your franchise is spending with each vendor, at each location, and what types of goods are being purchased. Management can easily leverage this data to negotiate pricing with vendors and identify opportunities to streamline operational expenditures. Sage Intacct effortlessly provides opportunities to your franchise managers for increased insight and control of operations, driving increased profitability for your entire franchise.

To scale your franchise’s growth, you need a solution that provides meaningful capabilities. Find out more about how rinehimerbaker can help you implement Sage Intacct and achieve success with your franchise. Check out this case study where rinehimerbaker leveraged Sage Intacct to drive success in a high-growth franchise.


Restaurant Financial Technology

Today’s Special: Technology Eases Financial Management Pain Points for Restaurateurs

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What happens in the back office of your restaurant isn’t ever a customer concern—unless, of course, their meal is missing a key ingredient or the credit card system goes down. Your customers are focused on their dining experience, and they probably don’t think beyond what happens in the kitchen; the only thing on their minds is the roulade, the house white, and the soup of the day.

Little do your customers know that on the other side of the kitchen wall resides the business management office, which offers up a different kind of hustle and bustle: inventory control, payroll processing, quarterly reporting and more. Let’s take a look at the pain points encountered within—because they signal the need for transformation.

Yesterday’s Technology

Restaurants that are still using manual accounting systems based on paper ledgers and spreadsheets find it hard to keep up with the fast-paced financial world around them, even if their processes include the use of boxed accounting software. This antiquated approach relies on yesterday’s latest-and-greatest—which pales in comparison to today’s automated, digital, accessible-24/7 solutions.

The challenge this presents for restaurant owners is that when compared with competitors who do leverage today’s technology, they’re not able to make the best use of their data and resources:

  • Keying the same transaction multiple times, into multiple systems, is time-consuming and can result in errors
  • Data housed in disparate systems (paper or electronic) doesn’t automatically sync for analysis
  • Operational and financial inefficiencies can lead to higher costs, delays, and even compliance risks

These roadblocks can be substantial for restaurant owners who have expansion plans. Most entry-level accounting software simply isn’t equipped to support increasing needs for inter-company transactions, real-time line item reporting across restaurants, or multi-user access. And without comprehensive insights into business drivers, owners don’t have adequate decision-support and can quickly lose competitive ground.

Tech-savvy Customers

We hate to suggest that customers are ever a pain point for a company, so let’s reframe this by saying that today’s digitally minded consumers are influencing change in the way restaurants approach their IT investments. Hospitality Technology’s 2017 Restaurant Technology Study found that for the first time in a decade, digital engagement displaced efficiency as the top strategic goal for IT investments. Indeed, improving digital customer engagement/loyalty is the top strategic goal cited by 61% of respondents. But that’s followed by improving business and customer analytics (39%), enhancing payment and data security (38%), and increasing employee productivity (27%).

 

With so much focus on the customer experience, restaurants are on the hook to deliver more than a delicious meal to the table (or front door). Efficiency still matters. That’s why restaurant IT environments that cater to both the customer and the office administrator are positioned to perform well into the future. It’s the best-in-class cloud-based solutions they can count on to support them at every angle.

Technology: On the Menu

Sage Intacct’s hospitality accounting software helps restaurateurs manage their financials for single or multiple locations. Thanks to automation technology, it’s easier than ever to keep up with evolving revenue recognition requirements, manage vendor payments, get real-time visibility into cash flow, and analyze operational and financial performance across a number of dimensions. Since the solution is cloud-based, it’s easily integrated with your existing systems—or those you’re planning to implement. As such, it’s scalable and can grow with you, whether that means expanding into new locations or introducing next-generation technology to delight employees and customers.

Get in contact with us to learn more.