My Method… How digitizing an IHG hotel helped save both time and money

As hotels look for ways to safely open doors and attract visitors in a highly competitive and challenging market, their resilience will continue to be tested. One challenge that the majority of hotels will face is how to successfully run operations with fewer staff, while continuing to meet customers’ high standards and expectations, which will certainly not have altered.

Taking a future-proofing approach to overcome this challenge has been part of our mission over the past decade. Working with hospitality brands around the world, we have developed a document management and workflow technology, specifically designed to help the hospitality industry overcome some of the current challenges.

DocMX streamlines hospitality processes and automates laborious administrative tasks that may impact customer services. The DocMX technology is designed to maximize staff capacity and save time, increasing productivity and in turn, boosting the bottom line.

While we have seen remarkable success with the implementation of DocMX in all aspects of back-office hotel management, one area that sees outstanding results is in financial operations. One case in point has been how DocMX helped an InterContinental Hotels Group property, InterContinental Cascais-Estoril, to automate the daily revenue audits by around 90%, saving considerable time for various managers in all departments, facilitating remote collaboration and reducing print-related costs.

Here's how it was done.

Overcoming the problematic and time-exhaustive manual paper trail

Located in a historic town on the Portuguese Riviera, the InterContinental Cascais-Estoril has been working with DocMX since 2019 to digitize large parts of its financial operations.

The hotel’s revenue is generated from multiple sources thanks to its multifaceted offering including meeting and event facilities as well as a restaurant and spa. Due to the nature of these daily transactions, the complex paper trail that is created from manual reporting and daily auditing was inefficient, with potential errors, delays and lapses in security.

The paper trail inefficiencies were a concern for the hotel’s income auditor, Diogo Gaspar, who said: “It was this particular pain point that prompted us to implement DocMX. We were wasting so much time auditing all the piles of paper each day,” with the team struggling to approve reports on time.

Gaspar added: “It was a struggle to ensure timely reporting, and sometimes documents were missed.” This was often due to paper reports being passed between different teams, including the front office/night manager, income auditor, credit manager, heads of department, director of finance and general manager.”

This exorbitant amount of paper led the hotel to question the unnecessary costs, from burnt man-hours through reporting and filing, to inefficient back and forth across different departments, to printer leasing and materials. Furthermore, the hotel recognized its impact on the environment and set off to reduce waste.

How automated software removed the pain point in a matter of days

After discussing all of the specific challenges and desired improvements at this IHG property with the management team, we presented a variety of software options. We understood that we needed to implement software that not only matched the property’s requirements but also aligned with IHG processes and global policies.

The team agreed that the best course of action would be to digitize their financial processes using DocMX, starting with the Daily Income Audit.

Our DocMX engineer team then configured the system to pull relevant income transaction reports into one place from the many different sources such as the PMS, POS, paperwork and even emails, to present everything in a single dashboard customized for each team member/role.

Within a few days, the handover took place in a live environment, the DocMX team walked IHG through the remote training phase, sharing tips and tricks to help IHG benefit from the many years of development and savings within the hospitality industry. With daily finance information now in one place, manual steps like revenue reconciliation could be streamlined with efficient automated workflow structures, resulting in considerable time savings for the team to focus on more value-add work.

Diogo Gaspar thus estimated the savings: “As an income auditor doing everything on paper, it used to take me over two hours to review and audit transactions every day - now with DocMX it takes just 30-minutes to do the same tasks. It also saves considerable time for the front oOffice/night auditor, credit manager and heads of department. It’s also helped us to save reams of paper, since we no longer need to print all the reports, and also on printer contracts.”

Removing the need to print a Night Pack of 900 pages daily, our customers typically estimate that they save over $20,000 per year on print-related expenditure, such as copier leasing, cost per print, paper and off-site storage (typically a seven-year legal requirement in line with local tax legislation). Additionally, they save an average of 20 to 30 hours every week on admin work across all departments. Efficiencies are even more significant when accounting for the digitization of other processes like accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger and aspects of HR and payroll.

Remote collaboration became a long-term benefit in the wake of the pandemic

As the pandemic hit and much of the world went into a state of lockdown, DocMX’s software enabled the hotel team to collaborate remotely, from various locations, whether at home or in an office.

Diogo Gaspar commented: “With DocMX I was still able to undertake all aspects of my job from home during the COVID-19 crisis. Using DocMX meant that I had everything set up in such a way that I simply needed to log in and audit/approve the automated documents within the system.”

The pandemic has highlighted the need for hospitality businesses to operate in leaner, more agile and sustainable ways. We have seen firsthand how this can be achieved with the help of the latest intelligent automation tools. The digitally empowered teams of our customers do more with less, collaborate seamlessly, and are overall more resilient in the face of current and any future disruptions - with benefits and savings that will continue in the long-term.