It’s that time of the year again! Christmas bookings have started, Are you prepared for the surge?
2024 is predicted to see a 54% increase in Christmas bookings compared to last year as the impacts of COVID-19 thankfully dwindle. Leveraging this spike in revenue is crucial for hospitality businesses before the January off-peak.
To help you and your team prepare for the rush and maximise profit margins, we’re divulging 3 quick-win strategies. The goal is to improve your current Accounts Payable processes. This will help your team focus on important tasks instead of boring data entry during the busiest time of the year.
Use hospitality purchasing software to gift your team with value-driven tasks
Use hospitality purchasing software to gift your team with value-driven tasks
The Christmas season brings more than just an influx of customers for the hospitality industry—it also increases administrative work like data entry of bills or chasing Purchase Order approvals. Mundane and repetitive tasks can leave staff feeling demotivated.
The good news is that you can empower your staff by automating processes and shifting to hospitality software like Lightyear, which enables the finance team to work smarter.
Automating manual tasks is a quick win. You benefit from reduced errors and save hours of tedious work. Hospitality provider, Soho Theatre processes around 300 supplier invoices each month and saved 20 hours weekly of admin work after introducing Lightyear. Some ways they did this were:
- Using Lightyear’s AI data extraction technology to strip line-item details, supplier names, dates, and totals from invoices, receipts and credit notes, which significantly reduced data entry requirements.
- Creating rules to automate bookkeeping and VAT allocation. This eliminated the repetitive task of coding each invoice individually.
- Automating supplier statement reconciliation which saved hours of cross-referencing and equipped the team to manage missing invoices efficiently and keep suppliers happy.
By automating many of the time-consuming jobs, staff can take on more fulfilling responsibilities, such as negotiating better deals with suppliers, controlling operational costs, or optimising cash flow.
Tis the Season for Stronger Supplier Relationships
Tis the Season for Stronger Supplier Relationships
Suppliers are key to your success during Christmas. Increased bookings across the industry will put higher pressure on all hospitality suppliers. Fostering a strong relationship with vendors will facilitate smooth operations and drive higher profit margins.
Hotelier,Laundry Hotels set themselves apart by expediting supplier payments. This nurtured a positive relationship between the business and its suppliers and ensured operational efficiency. By automatically routing invoices for approval through Lightyear, it reduced approval times from 10 days to just 1!
Faster approvals mean faster payments, putting you in a better position to negotiate favourable payment terms and product pricing. By reducing overall costs, you can maximise profit margins during your prime season.
Building trust and developing supplier relationships helps you secure essential products with preferential delivery, ensuring smooth service delivery and exceptional customer service.
Deck the Halls with Cost Savings
Deck the Halls with Cost Savings
Keeping costs in check during the Christmas period doesn’t have to be a burdensome task.
Adopting hospitality software for your finance team puts structures in place to guarantee purchases are carefully reviewed and approved on time. Timely Purchase Order approvals help you pay your suppliers faster, which means you are more likely to get discounts on bulk purchases or advance orders.
Automation in Lightyear helps you identify discrepancies between agreed pricing and invoiced amounts through its price-checking feature.
During peak periods, duplicate invoices can become a common issue. To mitigate this, Lightyear flags duplicates before they are processed. Use it as your financial watchdog to ensure you’re not double-paying bills. A 2023 survey found that 25% of invoices are duplicates. For a business with $1 million in annual vendor payments, this could mean $20,000 in unnecessary costs.
Keeping track of what products you have received and payments concerning these products can be challenging. By automating your cross-checking with 3-way matching between POs, Invoices, and Goods Received Notes, you can confirm you’re only paying for what you ordered and received.
Data analysis should be a non-negotiable for your team. Tracking price changes over time, highlighting expensive products or services, and identifying popular produce are all ways you can control costs and maximise profits during Christmas.
Before Lightyear, Nelson Meers Hotel Group spent 4 hours compiling financial reports. Now, they can gather specific data in just 1 hour. This has helped them in decision-making and fuelled growth.
Takeaways
Takeaways
The festive season can be daunting for your finance team, but applying these 3 quick wins to your AP processes can generate high-impact returns.
These strategies have one thing in common - automation. By introducing hospitality software that automates the majority of your existing processes will set you up for success, not only during Christmas, but all year round.
1.
You don’t need to re-do your processes, just enhance them to free up time for your team
2.
Strong supplier relationships are key to delivering high-quality service to your customers
3.
Automation is the future for hospitality finance teams to remain successful and drive growth
Other resources
CASE STUDY
How Laundy Hotels has increased AP efficiency by 80% since introducing Lightyear
LIVE WEBINARS
Join our live webinar to see how Lightyear works to enhance AP processes across your business
Join our live webinar to see how Lightyear works to enhance AP processes across your business
