IN ASSOCIATION WITH
TRAVELODGE TAKES ITS FINANCES TO THE CLOUD
One of the most recent hospitality companies to make the shift to the cloud is the UK’s largest independent hotel chain, Travelodge. It is implementing the cloud version of Infor SunSystems as its financial management solution because it removes the need for on-site hardware at each hotel, and because it can scale in line with the company’s growth. Nick Taylor, director of operational finance
at Travelodge said: “We are the UK’s largest independent hotel chain and we are a growing business. We have recently invested £100m to upgrade our hotels with a new contemporary brand look and feel. We have exchanged contracts for more new hotels in the first half of 2015 than we did for the whole of 2014, and we have plans to open in at least 250 further locations over the years ahead. To support these growth plans, we need a world-class operations and financial infrastructure and, by working with Infor SunSystems via a cloud model, we are able to do exactly that.” “The budget hotel market has substantial
room for growth in the UK,” adds Wolfgang Emperger, vice-president, EMEA and LATAM, Infor Hospitality. “A critical part of achieving success in this market is to streamline local operations at the hotel itself and then centralise and accelerate as much of the back-end as possible. “Technologies such as optical character
recognition scanning and automatic bank reconciliation all contribute to this success, especially when they are delivered via the cloud, and they can scale quickly as a business grows.”
And this can be to the detriment of the appli- cations that are running in the background to make the business function smoothly. “We frequently find finance systems in the hospitality industry are old and not fully inte- grated, resulting in the mismatch of data and the need to pull data from multiple sources,” he says. He adds that the end result is almost guaranteed to be confusion, which is normally remedied by using a large number of systems and an over-reliance on the finance team spending a lot of their time creating reports. “There are too many spreadsheets,” adds
John Reid, owner and consultant at Hospitality IT Solutions Consultancy (HitSoCo). “Excel is a crutch for the hospitality industry.” Yet, this really doesn’t need to be the case.
With the most state-of-the-art systems availa- ble on the market, information can be pulled from a property’s PMS into its financial man- agement system, and from there to a business
www.thecaterer.com
intelligence solution, giving operators a single picture of how their operation is performing and, in the process, saving a huge amount of time for finance teams.
Compliant and in the cloud So what are the musts for modern hospitality businesses today? First, for hotels specifically, accounts must be compliant with the Uniform System for Accounting in the Lodging Indus- try (USALI) which, as of July 2014, is on its 11th edition. “It’s the way we report, the way our profit and loss looks – it covers everything in the way hospitality should manage things like expenses and the way we sell our rooms,” explains Calum McIndoe, sales director for hospitality at Infor. “So whenever you put in a financial solution, you need to make sure that it’s compliant with USALI and reports in that way.”
Technology Prospectus 2016 | 23
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