No More Manual Mapping: How Country Clubs Are Using AI to Automate GL Coding and Approvals
by The Ottimate Editorial Team
A country club may be a single entity, but it encompasses multiple lines of business, including a restaurant, bar, golf course, pro shop, and more. This presents a unique challenge for the AP staff responsible for processing invoices. Let’s look at how AI-driven AP automation is helping country clubs overcome paperwork limitations and discover new efficiencies.
Automating invoice GL mapping
At the prestigious NorthStone Country Club in Huntersville, North Carolina, staff members were struggling to manage the many invoices they received in the mail, by hand, and via email. Each one was sent to the relevant department head, who spent several minutes reviewing and manually coding it. Once the invoice made it to the AP office, the Officer Manager keyed the details into NorthStone’s ERP system and printed a check run twice a week to pay vendors.
This was a time-consuming workflow that was prone to errors. Although processing simple invoices didn’t take much time, NorthStone received many invoices that were much more complicated. To process just one for a large food and beverage vendor, a staff member had to painstakingly enter dimensions for “ten different GL accounts, ten different expense accounts, and ten different asset accounts for food cost,” according to Steve Foster, NorthStone’s Chief Financial Officer and Assistant General Manager.
Like many country clubs, NorthStone has multiple departments, each of which has its distinct budget. This means there needs to be separate financial workflows for golf, administration, food and beverage, course maintenance, club operations, and more. Some of their invoices could be for one department and only have a couple of dimensions, whereas others applied to several business areas and required more complicated mapping.
“It’s not uncommon for an invoice to be $12,000 and to have 18 GL splits on it,” Foster said. “So it’s really helpful when filet mignon goes to the same GL account every time.”
Choosing proven AP automation technology
Once NorthStone’s leadership team decided that they needed an AP automation suite, they looked for a system that could use AI to learn all of its GL categories and code invoices without human intervention. According to Foster, “the level of granularity and detail that Ottimate can process on an invoice” was essential and “the high level of visibility of price changes that you get right on the dashboard, [as well as] how accurate Ottimate’s processing engine and processes were to get GL coding correct” set the system apart.
Another selection criterion was finding a vendor with proven experience in the hospitality industry. “I felt like Ottimate did food and beverage better than anybody else, and it wasn’t close,” Foster said. “That was ultimately the tipping point for me.”
Now, as soon as an invoice goes into Ottimate, it uses AI for automatic coding. Machine learning intelligently learns the categories so that a GL code only has to be entered once, and from then on, it’s coded without user intervention. NorthStone’s food and beverage department was the first to achieve the time savings and increased accuracy that Ottimate offers.
“Within a month, 90 percent of all of their invoices are coming in coded,” Foster said. “It probably saves that team four or five hours a week, minimum, in terms of just coding invoices. And then of course, the accuracy component adds to that.”
Expanding AI-driven efficiencies across the enterprise
After the successful initial implementation, NorthStone easily expanded Ottimate’s invoice processing solution to other areas. Each department oversees its inventory, invoice management, and payment processing, so the ability to achieve end-to-end AP automation was appealing. It gives department heads more control over their costs and spending, while also providing oversight to the AP team.
“They have control over the timing of expenses on their income statement — to the extent that it’s reasonable — but we all still have visibility into the process,” Foster said.
With the accurate GL coding that Ottimate’s machine learning performs automatically, every department at NorthStone finds it easier to compare projected spending in budgets to actual day-to-day costs.
“They have complete ownership for not only the budget, but also the expenses that go up against that budget,” Foster said. “They can make sure that things are exactly where they need to be.”
Confronting paper invoice challenges
The Club at Ravenna is one of Colorado’s premier country clubs. To ensure it provides the best possible service to members, Ravenna must offer premium goods in its pro shop, restaurant, and other amenities. This requires processing and approving invoices quickly so that vendors are paid in a timely manner. However, manually processing paperwork got in the way.
“There was a lot of paper going around,” said Accounting Manager Stephanie Liby. “I was spending a lot of my time just trying to sort through what invoices we’ve already entered, which ones we haven’t entered, which ones were approved. It was really kind of confusing.”
One of the issues was that department managers had to print, code, review, and approve invoices. As departments are spread out across Ravenna’s large property, there was a disconnect with the AP team.
“We would scan [invoices] in and send them to the department and wait to get them back, approved,” Liby said. “Managers would have to print them out and code them, then send that in an email back to the accounting team just so that we knew they were approved and that they could be paid.”
The Benefits of Electronic Invoice Approval Routing
With Ottimate’s automated workflows, invoices are distributed electronically. Ravenna was able to mirror their existing approvals process, without paperwork being passed back and forth. Conditional routing ensures invoices are sent to the staff members who need to review them, and they can quickly issue authorization. The invoices are then sent back to AP for final processing and to initiate payment.
“We code invoices by department and have the heads of those departments approve them,” Liby said. “If it goes to G&A, I have our CFO approve it. If it goes to horticulture or housekeeping, that’s the same manager for both those. There are specific vendors that the Golf Pro approves and then specific vendors that the Player Services Manager approves. So the chain of approval depends on which invoice we get. And if there’s an invoice over $10,000, I have the manager approve it, but I also have our CFO approve it, too.”
Using Automated GL Coding to Split Invoices
Before deploying Ottimate, Liby’s team used to spend hours each week going through each invoice line item and coding it to the general ledger (GL). Now, Ottimate AI learns the code or codes that each item corresponds to and maps it automatically. If an invoice pertains to more than one department, Ottimate splits it between them.
“If I upload an invoice to the golf course maintenance email address, for example, that would be automatically coded to the golf course maintenance department, which is great,” Liby said. “But if the invoice is for items like, let’s say, apparel over at the golf shop, the actual inventory would be coded to a different department than the delivery fee, which goes to the golf shop.”
Now that AP automation is in place, the coding and approval steps are expedited. Ottimate also updates the ERP system, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
“With Ottimate, the coding is pretty easy, and the approval is streamlined,” Liby said. “And then, obviously, the exporting to Jonas is only one little step.”
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