by Deepak Chauhan
Any organization that offers great service or quality products typically has some great work going on behind the scenes.
For the hotel industry, this often largely involves an I.T. department that ensures the hotel management system is reliable, HR office that recruits the best talents, and more importantly; a hotel accounting software that ensures secure and reliable financial management.
All these functions fall under the back office.
Just how crucial is back office for a hotel or hotel chain?
Every strategic decision that determines the very survival of the business is made within the back office. This underscores the vital need for a robust and effective hospitality back office software.
There are a lot of benefits that any hotel or hotel chain can realize from implementing an effective hospitality back office software.
Let’s look at some of the advantages of an integrated hospitality back office software solution offering inventory, food cost and accounts.
- System administration is cheaper
Implementing an integrated web based hotel accounting software solution reduces the overall cost of maintaining the hospitality back office software. The integrated web based hotel accounting software serves to reduce overall hardware and software requirements. Each hardware and/or software need often has its associated costs, thus reducing these needs helps cut the costs associated with them. Integrated solution also means that there is less chance of errors and human intervention as revenues and expenses flow automatically between guest facing modules to back office system.
An integrated hospitality back office software also means that you don’t have to procure, install, and/or maintain multiple solutions from different vendors for your F&B operations, Inventory and accounting.
Hotels and hotel chains normally have to install hospitality back office software for managing overhead departmental expenses such as utility bills, insurance sales, taxes and marketing expenses in their F&B environment.
Relying on various hospitality back office software solutions to manage F&B costing, Inventory and accounting from different vendors can become expensive, not to mention unreliable. Integration helps consolidate these resources and costs into a powerful and effective environment. This is extremely important for the overall managing of expected financial returns.
- Integration makes system administration easier
Integrating your web based hotel accounting software with the rest of the hospitality software infrastructure reduces the overall number of installations required.
This makes it easier for the various stakeholders who rely on hospitality and the back office accounting software to go about their duties.
Almost every stakeholder is involved ineffective and prompt guest service and cost control process for hotels and hotel chains. From general managers to line personnel, shift supervisors to culinary staff, account receivable/payable clerks to controllers and executive chefs – each of these rely on an effective PMS and back office solution for their day job.
A completely integrated hospitality solution and a simple software architecture ensure ease of operations at every level.
Web based solution offers an environment that a user can access anytime depending on their user access, various individuals can sign in to the system through a web browser or via an installed app. In any case, they will be able to access and facilitate the operations with simple clicks of a button.
- The most complex back office operations can be run from anywhere
Hotel accounting managers and other personnel do not have to be physically present in the office to access functions of the web based hotel accounting software. Since the hotel software is Web based, they can sign into the system from any part of the world as long as they have an internet connectivity and an internet enabled handset.
Hotel chains can centralize data, processes, and workflows, hence cutting down on resources at each property and managing operations centrally. This provides a great opportunity to top management to ensure operations are always effective and within budget.
This can significantly increase the efficiency of operations across the hotel or hotel chain. Any technical glitch in the office may not, therefore, affect any element of accounts including F&B cost management, inventory management, purchases, accounts payable and accounts receivable operations – just to mention a few.
Accounts personnel can process invoices and ensure they are ready to go out for payment in time even when they (staff) cannot physically visit the office. This is because they have all the data they need to prepare the invoices from a central hospitality back office software dashboard.
The system automates workflows and provides alerts to intended users on mobiles and emails to provide approvals and authorize purchases, payments etc.
- There’s increased room for accelerated growth
When your web based hotel accounting software and the entire hospitality software solution that runs your business operations is integrated around one codebase, your business can effectively innovate and scale.
How you go about it will depend on the hotel’s internal growth strategies.
