AP Automation in Hospitality: Real Stories from Hotels, Clubs & Resorts
by The Ottimate Editorial Team
Whether you’re in the restaurant, hotel, or country club business, you need to process incoming invoices promptly. Yet, a combination of paper and electronic formats, a manual approval workflow, and a disconnect with your ERP system can lead to costly delays and staff spending excessive time uploading, coding, and routing invoices.
Fortunately, help is at hand, as the latest AI-driven automation technology reduces invoice processing turnaround by up to 80 percent. Let’s see how this benefits staff, vendors, bottom line, and – most crucially – customers at hospitality companies like yours.
WHG Companies builds, franchises, and manages hotels located in small towns across the U.S., providing guests with full-service accommodations that include a complimentary breakfast and numerous on-site amenities. When Sarah Zuehlke joined WHG as a bookkeeper, the company managed 12 properties. However, it has since grown rapidly, and she is now the lead accountant for 60 locations. This fast expansion presented logistical issues for invoice processing.
Managers at each WHG property bundled up paper invoices and mailed them to the company headquarters. As this could take a couple of weeks, and some bills were misplaced, some vendors were left wondering why they hadn’t been paid. Once the documents arrived, this initiated a time-consuming series of tasks.
“Everything was super manual,” Zuehlke said. “We got the invoices, put them into our Sage 50 program. And then print checks, fold them, and mail them… It was a pretty labor-intensive process with 60 hotels.”
WHG sought a system that would offer a better solution and found Ottimate. After a successful trial with invoice batches at one hotel, the company expanded its new AP automation solution to all 60 properties, resulting in between 3,500 and 4,000 invoices processed per month. Doing so has given the finance team back hours each week.
“[Ottimate] has freed up a lot of time with the team who was doing the processing, so now they can take on more work and do other things,” Zuehlke said.
Deploying Ottimate also saves time and effort for hotel general managers, who can now focus less on paperwork and more on guest services. Rather than preparing and posting bundles of paper invoices, most are captured via a convenient mobile app, which securely and instantly routes images for processing.
“Now, I get a lot of good feedback from the managers that Ottimate is just amazing, because now they don’t ever have to go to the post office to drop off their bills each week,” Zuehlke said. “It’s so simple to use for all those managers that it was just a 10-to-20-minute training.”
Expediting invoice approval
Much like WHG, managers at each of Golder Hospitality’s 14 locations across the Midwest used to spend too much time collecting invoices and manually coding them in an invoice processing system that wasn’t integrated with the company’s ERP suite. The back office team then began searching for a replacement that was better suited to their needs.
“One thing I really liked about Ottimate was that it understood hospitality,” said Shelby Tufenk, controller at Golder. “Hospitality is a unique industry. We’re not just a regular business. And so whenever we’re looking at vendors, we need it to be a vendor that understands the space, that is accessible 24/7 — because we’re an industry that doesn’t shut down.”
Now, invoices are quickly captured in various formats and automatically coded. Unlike the previous system, Ottimate is integrated with Golder’s accounting software, allowing for seamless updates between the two without requiring manual data entry. “Ottimate was able to build us a way to connect with our accounting software. I told them what I needed and — boom! — they did it,” Tufenk said.
Ottimate has also expedited another key component of the invoice processing that was previously slow and laborious: approvals. With conditional routing, approvers see only those documents that need their attention and can quickly authorize invoice payments.
“I love the fact that every property has its own email address,” Tufenk said. “After the invoices are automatically coded, the GM goes in and says, ‘Yep, this all looks good.’ Then Kirsten [Haley, Golder’s AP manager] goes in to give final approval or make any changes. It’s so easy — it’s just one, two, three, done!”
The ease with which this two-level approval process is completed has allowed Golder to significantly reduce the time it takes to capture, code, and approve each invoice.
“One thing I love about Ottimate is the turnaround time, from scanning to when [the invoice] is available,” Tufenk said. “It’s a lot faster than our old system.”
“I like how once you scan something, you can actually see its progress,” adds Kirsten. “Even if it hasn’t fully uploaded, you can click on it, and it tells you what property, what invoice, and the amount and everything before it even comes in. So that’s nice.”
Creating new workflows and expanding without adding AP staff
While some hospitality companies, like Golder, have expedited invoice processing by replicating their old manual approval process with a faster electronic version in Ottimate, the platform has enabled others to overhaul their payment authorization process completely. This was the case for Nivea Hospitality, a third-party management and development partner of hotels and resorts.
“We didn’t really have an approvals process before Ottimate,” said Vanessa Troyer, Nivea’s CFO. “We just knew that if someone emailed an invoice to us, then a GM had obviously approved it, and whoever entered it had looked at it. But now we have just that one extra person looking at them and making sure that everything’s good.”
Like many other hospitality firms, Nivea is always seeking opportunities to expand into more locations. Their invoice automation solution enables them to do so in a more cost-effective manner.
“Ottimate makes it easy to scale as you add properties, without adding more staff,” Troyer said. “Because a lot of times as a management company, especially if you’re smaller, as you add properties, you’re really deciding, ‘When can we afford the next person?’ You don’t have to worry about that with Ottimate.”
Similarly, Golder is confident that Ottimate will continue to scale with the company as it grows. “When you add a new company on Ottimate, it’s just, ‘Here’s the new email address, here’s all the information’ — and boom! You’re good to go,” Tufenk said. “Plus, [Ottimate’s] setup costs are beyond reasonable, which is great for adding new properties.”
Managing invoices, payments, and budgets by department and location
A significant challenge in the hospitality industry is processing invoices and payments for multiple departments or business units. AP automation software enables multisite companies to automatically code invoices by a single site or split them between multiple locations. Meanwhile, single-property hospitality businesses appreciate that the same system allows them to assign invoices to a single business area or multiple areas.
This feature has proved particularly useful at The Club at Ravenna, the premier country club in Colorado.
“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,” said Stephanie Liby, accounting manager. “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.”
Performing such tasks on top of basic invoice processing used to dominate a fifth of Liby’s work week, but with Ottimate removing some steps and accelerating others, she now has more bandwidth. “I was spending a full day every week just sorting through paper and making sure I knew the status of each invoice,” she said. “Now, since Ottimate recognizes a lot of the different line items already, that’s about 30 minutes a morning — max. Most of the time, it’s 10 or 15 minutes.”
The Club at Ravenna is also utilizing Ottimate VendorPay and has integrated its complete invoice and payment automation solution with its Jonas Club Management software. This makes it easier to run reports that compare projected and actual spending, which improves budget management.
“In both Ottimate and Jonas, our total financials combine all of our departments,” Liby said. “But we can also split them out and see how, for example, F&B is doing at our clubhouse, how the fitness center is doing, stuff like that. Every department that we have, we can see individually. We just want to make sure we’re performing to our budget. So that’s why we keep track of actuals in that same way.”
Whether it’s freeing up time for her to focus more on finance reporting or enabling staff members in the restaurant, pro shop, and other areas to have more face time with club members, Liby feels like end-to-end AP automation with Ottimate has been a big win.
“Managers can approve invoices from their phones, wherever they are, and have vendors send bills directly to the platform,” she said. “So it’s been a lot more efficient. I’d rather have it this way than having the GMs spend more time on invoices. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Ottimate from them.”
Ready to learn more about how Ottimate can remove the headaches, delays, and hassle from your invoice process? Book your customized demo now.