The hospitality industry is thriving, with employment growing even when other industries are slowing down. Running a hotel or restaurant is a highly rewarding, but often exhausting, career. Hospitality owners and managers need to balance daily administration with providing top-quality customer service in an industry where consumers have come to expect the very best.
As busy as hospitality professionals are, they have little time to waste on outdated manual processes. Fortunately, technology can bring businesses up to date, saving time and reducing costly errors. Here are a few ways accounts payable (AP) automation can help your hospitality business run more effectively.
Centralization
Like the retail industry, hospitality companies often deal with coordinating multiple locations, sometimes spread across a wide regional area. If each site has an accounting process that isn’t connected to the other locations, coordination becomes even more complicated. AP automation brings everything together in one place, making it easier for employees in each of those locations to do their jobs. In some cases, part of the accounting tasks can be handled by corporate, taking some of the workload off workers at individual locations.
Multi-Device Support
Today’s teams rarely work from a single device. In hospitality, workers need to be able to work on the run, whether they’re checking on a payment from home or working from another location for the day. AP automation allows your employees to access the software they need from a variety of devices, including tablets, smartphones, and desktop computers, giving back office employees the freedom they need to move around.
Improved Employee Morale
When you have software that does part of the work for your accounting teams, you equip them to be more efficient and productive. This benefits you, but it also helps your employees, who now can focus on the many other duties clamoring for attention each day. Over time, morale will improve, leading to a reduction in turnover and an overall improvement in your work culture. Best of all, you’ll be able to compete with the many other hospitality businesses in your area for the top leadership and administrative talent, rather than losing them to competitors who do automate their AP.
Improved Customer Service
Outdated processes make a bad impression on employees, vendors, and any other business partners you’ve chosen. Your system may lead to accounting errors that overcharge a supplier, causing them to cancel. You may also find that invoices go unpaid, causing a late delivery on the supplies you need to provide top-quality customer service to your guests. Automation can help you maintain the high level of customer and vendor service that you need to provide in order to thrive.
Accounts payable can be a time-consuming part of a hospitality business’s operations. The right automation solution can empower managers and back-end administrative staff with the tools they need to work more efficiently and accurately. It’s important to find an accounts payable solution that meets the unique needs of your own hospitality business, whether it’s a multi-location hotel franchise or a one-location small-town diner.
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