At HITEC June 15 – 18 visit Aptech in Booth #921 at the Austin Convention Center
How Does a Leading Hotel Management Company ‘Complete the Suite?’ With Profitvue Enterprise Accounting, Execuvue Business Intelligence and Targetvue Budget/Forecasting
By Cam Troutman, Vice President of Aptech Computer Systems
It is said that adversity can bestow unexpected benefits. This was the case 16 years ago when Highpointe Hotel Corporation searched for a new back office accounting system to weather the dreaded Y2K bug. The worldwide millennial computer meltdown never materialized. But Highpointe’s vendor search resulted in a “successful long-term relationship” with Aptech Computer Systems that is still going strong, says Mark Pate, Highpointe’s assistant controller/IT Director.
Highpointe is a full-service hotel management and development company based in Gulf Breeze, Florida. It operates 15 properties in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana. As Pate tells the Y2K story, “With the millennium approaching, we discovered that our old vendor didn’t even have a software patch for our back office system. That is when we first met with Aptech.”
‘Aptech is more of a strategic partner than a vendor’
“We were impressed from the start with Aptech’s conversion of our old DOS-based back office software to the Profitvue® solution,” says Pate. “Aptech created a custom program that even imported our third-party vendor data. They did everything possible to make our transition easy. Aptech knows the hotel industry and its systems are hospitality-specific. The company’s business philosophy aligns with our own focus on customer service; what they do goes beyond the typical business relationship. We think of Aptech as more of a strategic partner than a vendor.”
Tightly integrated analysis compares property performance to industry stats
Highpointe also added Aptech’s Execuvue® Business Intelligence and Targetvue Budgeting and Forecasting systems to ‘Complete the Suite’ of Aptech solutions. “Sticking with a single, solid vendor is always easier,” says Pate. “Aptech is the only company in the industry I know of that provides all the systems and functionality we need on one tightly integrated platform.”
“Much of our business is driven by the numbers from Execuvue,” notes Pate. “Aptech wrote interface programs so Highpointe’s payroll and HR systems upload time and attendance data to Execuvue without our staff having to rekey. Execuvue integrates that information with data on guest satisfaction, back office financials, Smith Travel Research, and soon TripAdvisor into our enterprise and property reporting system. Seeing this information side by side helps us understand the factors that influence performance and profitability so we make better business decisions.”
‘We needed a system that was better than Excel’
Highpointe upgraded to Targetvue “because we needed a budgeting/forecasting system that was better than Excel,” explains Pate. “For example, one of our property owners requires line-item forecasting with 30, 60, and 90-day projections to year end. These processes are nearly impossible in Excel.” Aptech customized Targetvue to accommodate Highpointe’s unique budgeting requirements.
“Cash is important to us” says Pate. “We want to look at cash on a daily basis and reconcile each bank account every day. Aptech created functionality specifically for this purpose.” He adds that Aptech Vice President Jill Wilder came onsite to ensure that all vendor data was migrated successfully to Targetvue.
Now all parties work from a single version of the budget on the same database. Changes and ‘what if’ projections flow seamlessly through the entire document. “We no longer pass around Excel spreadsheets and continuously verify if we are using the final version,” notes Pate. “Likewise, we are no longer concerned if a property is using an outdated version of Excel. These were ongoing issues for the director of operations when we used Excel.”
The cloud is safer
Adversity delivered another valuable lesson to Highpointe when Hurricanes Iva and Katrina struck. “Those two years of strong hurricanes prompted a migration from our own servers to cloud hosting by Aptech,” says Pate. “Our Louisiana and Florida properties were ‘blind’ for two weeks when we had to move our onsite servers to safety. Now, we send everything possible to the cloud. We push data to Aptech’s secure network center twice a day to protect us from power outages and other data loss issues.”
Pate concluded, “We are a best-of-breed tech user and Aptech has proven to be a best-of-breed provider. We don’t know of any other budgeting solution like Targetvue that fully integrates with our other systems. This saves us a great deal of time and makes our operation more efficient. We don’t know any other vendor with three comprehensive solutions that allows property data to flow so smoothly between them.”
