YAS! You asked, we listened: we have noticed that our clients need a helping hand when it comes to hospitality accounting. Our experience has taught us that there's a considerable need for consulting in financial processes, which includes more than giving advice and support. It's a combination of providing information and advice, proposing ways to improve businesses efficiency, making recommendations and facilitating client learning.
Financial data is key to be aware of within the hospitality industry. It helps hospitality professionals to identify important patterns and trends in order to improve their guest experience. Proper consultancy allows them to make better use of (financial) data already available and reach their full business potential. This is why we're happy to announce that hospitality accounting consultancy is now officially part of our services!
Our enthusiastic colleague and consultant Patrick will be offering a helping hand on these matters. We asked him a few questions to give you a better idea of what this new service is about.
What does Hospitality Accounting Consultancy include?
It is actually a service that we offer in addition to our customer support. This means that we guide our clients through the onboarding process of a PMS system. We give advice and direction to take control of their finances and financial administration. As a result, our Hospitality Accounting Consultancy solution helps hospitality businesses improve their performance.
We decided to put our knowledge and experience into a service, based on the lessons we have learned along the way.
What made you decide to offer consultancy as a service?
I have had so many conversations with clients about what they could do best with their financial data to improve performance, by providing step-by-step instructions and assistance. This refers to the setup of the PMS system and the accounting system.
Clients usually have an idea of what they want to achieve. However, they often don't know how to achieve that and what their options are. This is where we come in! We will discuss their needs and wishes by starting at their PMS system, which is considered the most important source of information. We will go through the PMS system together first. After that, we will discuss various possibilities: such as how to manage multiple payment methods. The questions that come together with this step may include: 'What insights do they want to have into their Sales?', 'What do they want to do with their guest ledger and prepayments?' or 'Do they want us to provide insight into their accounts receivable?'. These are all examples of choices that should be made and things that should be considered. It’s important to know that the decisions made in the PMS system have a direct effect on your journal entries and the information you will receive.
Are you referring to the setup of the PMS system as a whole or, more particularly, to the financial aspect?
We strongly focus on the financial aspect of the business, since we create smart connections between PMS systems and accounting software to enable automatic synchronization of financial data. Eventually, the PMS system should be properly set up as a whole in order to successfully transfer all the data.
Data quality as well as data accessibility play an important role in this. Once the setup is done properly, we will be able to turn data into actionable insights and reports. We always keep referring to the simple 'shit in, shit out'-method. If you put shit in, then you can guarantee that you will get shit out. All I am saying is that when something is not working smoothly in the setup, this could directly affect the set-up as a whole, the flows, links and data information needs.
Are you implying that the first step is to optimize the setup, followed by the hospitality accounting consultancy service?
That is correct, we want to create a clear separation between our customer support and our consultancy as a service.
What will be the key benefits of using the Hospitality Accounting Consultancy service?
Hospitality professionals will exclusively receive journal entries and customer support without our consultancy service. Experience has taught us that this usually doesn't deliver the desired business results, flow and performance. Because in the end, we will be able to create journal entries anyway; that is not the problem. Just look at it this way: guests usually have multiple payment options. You could decide to send all the payment information to a certain ledger account, but this would not give clear insights as it includes different payment methods.
You could also decide to split this information for each payment method to be able to gain powerful, actionable insights into your finances.
What are the types of questions we should think about related to Hospitality Accounting Consultancy?
We get a lot of questions about the various financial elements that specifically belong to the hospitality industry: the variety of payment methods, the guest ledger, deposit ledger and accounts receivables. Besides that, we frequently give insights on how to deal with OTA's (Online Travel Agencies).
Especially large hotel chains face these financial challenges. They manage their finance and accounting across a handful of locations. Managing complex financials across multiple locations raises serious questions.
Who will this service be interesting to?
Hospitality Accounting Consultancy will be primarily interesting to existing clients. Secondly, we created this service for hospitality businesses that are switching to a new PMS system or accounting system by one our partners. This implementation and the connection of Omniboost to an online accounting software often go hand in hand. We consider these hospitality businesses as prospective clients.
Switching from one PMS system to another is a great moment to get things organized properly. Hospitality Accounting Consultancy will help to address gaps and identify opportunities for improvement. A practical example: we have an existing customer who hired a new accountant at some stage to look into his accounting. It turned out things were not going so well. They invited us to help them optimize their set-up and business operations.
How will you offer the Hospitality Accounting Consultancy Service?
I would always prefer on-site consultancy, a more personal approach. This helps us to truly understand our clients and it is the easiest way to communicate.
Let's get in touch!
Our consultant Patrick is excited to give you more specific information about our new service. He would love to offer a helping hand in optimizing your accounting processes! Get in contact with Patrick via patrick@omniboost.io.