[White Paper] Growing Your Hotel Empire with ProfitSword: Digging into the Savings of Hotel Business Intelligence

How a best-in-class, custom integrated performance data management platform leads to enhanced efficiencies, employee accountability, real-time data access, and increased revenue to your business’ bottom line.

For today’s hospitality industry, achieving greater operational and sales efficiencies while finding ways to lower overall costs has never been more important. These goals are crucial to any hotel business strategy aiming to endure either periods of market distress or healthy economic climates as hoteliers look to maximize profits from revenue streams in order to run a more successful operation. It is only with the rise of more advanced and accessible business intelligence technologies that hospitality professionals have been able to seamlessly convert greater performance data transparency and accuracy into maximized cost savings and profitability.

Solutions that fully automate the business performance forecasting and budgeting process have revolutionized a hotel’s ability to access and share information that can be critical to swiftly identifying profit or cost-saving opportunities. By simply streamlining business plan communications and strategy development procedures alone, they can further represent the ultimate operational cost reduction while opening the door to previously untapped efficiencies and company success.

Yet, for those still deciding whether a modern business intelligence and data management tool is right for them, the hospitality industry fortunately, possesses multiple solid examples of how such solutions translate into substantial savings and profitability for virtually any type of hotel operation. In this guide, see firsthand how ProfitSword and its expansive business intelligence and performance measuring solution is leading more hoteliers to experience enhanced efficiencies and lower costs across the breadth of their organization.

Faster Forecast Decision-making, Less Risks and Expenses

One of the key advantages of an advanced business forecasting tool within the ProfitSword BI Solution is its ability to integrate with a business’ multitude of performance-generating systems seamlessly. This feature removes the time-consuming need for employees to compile the analytics manually while offering them access to such metrics in real-time to depict the current financial environment accurately. By integrating with a hotel’s PMS, POS, and Labor Management systems, for example, varying levels of company leadership can instantly determine where unnecessary expenses may exist and can be curtailed. This can include revising guest supplies, overtime availability, food inventory, office materials, general maintenance needs, and many other areas representing a typical drain on revenue gains.

However, while any hotel business can attempt to make budget cuts with little to no thoughtful analysis, ProfitSword’s BI forecasting platform can eliminate the risk of making a hasty decision that may be detrimental to guest satisfaction and business needs. Instead, an advanced forecasting tool always ensures that hoteliers can readily determine future demand levels and make strategic cuts where there is an underutilized surplus. By offering the ability to re-allocate funds based on informed decision-making, the ProfitSword BI Solution is estimated to save up to $2,083 per month or $25,000 per year for a select-service hotel earning $10 million in annual revenue. A full-service hotel earning $25 million in annual revenue is estimated to realize an average savings of $6,250 per month or $75,000 per year.

Enhanced visibility into either company or property-wide performance further provides hoteliers with the crucial benefit of creating accurate performance-backed financial strategies that identify and maximize opportunities to increase profit margins. From the allocation of labor resources to departments expecting increased demand, to the shifting of funds to the increased availability of upcoming seasonal amenities, accurate, real-time accessible forecasting data ensures that revenue is invested in the right areas at the right time to guarantee maximum ROI. Through such day-to-day visibility using the ProfitSword BI Solution, a select-service hotel averaging $10 million in revenue can return $1,000 in savings each month. This means that savings can translate into $12,000 per year. At a full-service property earning $25 million in revenue, the savings increase to $2,500 per month or $30,000 each year.

Guaranteed Data Accuracy = Less Time Spent Verifying & More Savings

Virtually all businesses, including hotels, recognize the immense benefits that accurate forecasting and budgeting can provide in boosting operational efficiency, meeting customer demands, and maintaining revenues. These reasons are why so many organizations have traditionally gone through painstaking efforts to compile performance-related data and ensure its accuracy. Utilizing a single-database solution where analytics from operations systems are automatically and instantly stored in real-time, hotels can eliminate the guesswork and reduced confidence that comes with error-prone manual data gathering processes. Equally important, hotels can completely sidestep expenses associated with verifying data accuracy, such as the average retaining of an income auditor for $35,000 per year.

Equipped with features that further allow employees to effortlessly identify any potential out of balance or research errors in the data transfer process, the ProfitSword BI Solution eliminates an average of 15 hours spent per week, or 780 hours per year, in checking the validity of presented information. When paying an employee $18 per hour to perform such responsibilities, this can translate into $14,040 in savings for hotels each year by drastically reducing or eliminating any data verification tasks.

Earn Savings from Greater Communication Transparency

By operating as a unified web-based performance data management system, the ProfitSword Business Intelligence Solution also offers leadership and employees the ability to communicate on company performance and needs seamlessly. Gone are the days of hours-long meetings where team members are required to bring other employees and leadership up to speed on organization performance before enacting a response plan. Instead, each staff member can instantly access the ProfitSword Dashboard to review the latest performance metrics in real-time to stay consistently informed. Personnel can further make updates to data and include notations that are shared with others in real-time. These advantages provide companies with more time to roll out new strategies and measure results, and translate into additional savings earned from the planning phase.

For a General Manager, Operations Leader, Controller, and Directors of Sales, the ProfitSword BI Solution can reduce performance and financial health analysis times by an average of 4 hours for each position per week. Using an average salary of $46 per hour, the time saved by using ProfitSword’s forecasting solution translates into $38,272 in salary savings each year, while allowing personnel to focus their full time and attention on their respective areas of priority, lessening the need for a larger workforce.

Another example of data transparency leading to increased savings is the availability of Profit & Loss statements and other financial reporting statements within the ProfitSword Dashboard. These can eliminate time and expenses associated with mailing, emailing, or faxing documents to owners, managers, or properties. By consolidating the Income Journal and other daily performance measuring tasks into one easily accessible platform, hotel businesses can also eliminate an average annual cost of $45,000 associated with utilizing a corporate administrator’s services.

Another key cost-saving benefit of enhanced data communication with ProfitSword comes from simplified onboard employee training and greater staff retention. The user-friendly intuitive dashboard first ensures a hassle-free learning experience that allows staff to immediately focus on where the organization and their department stand financially. This, in turn, results in significantly reduced training time and related expenses as employees have immediate access to the tools they need to identify potential hotel business improvement areas. This not only leads to greater efficiency and revenue growth across the organization, it also ensures that employees equipped with ProfitSword’s solution can enhance their ability to make a positive impact and therefore feel more influential and valued in their current role. Employees who are satisfied with their position and can create growth for a company are less likely to look elsewhere for career fulfillment, resulting in significantly reduced turnover rates. With ProfitSword, turnover has been estimated to be reduced by two associates per year, which, if paid an average salary of $50,000, combines into a savings of $100,000 annually.

Full Data Performance Transparency Ensures Greater Accountability

One of the most important requirements to achieve business-wide financial success is the ability for individual team members to take full responsibility for their respective areas’ performance. By providing performance data access to an unlimited number of users, ProfitSword ensures that from the highest management levels to individual department heads, financial performance can be traced back to a specific individual or team’s actions on a day-to-day basis. This incentivizes every employee to strive to perform at their highest potential and provides company leaders with the ability to identify employees that may require additional assistance or training. Examples of those who can benefit from this functionality include a Sales Manager needing to meet monthly goals for the selling of a package promotion, or F&B Managers needing to ensure that available items align with current guest demographic demands.

By being able to benchmark individual performance and adequately determine accountability, hoteliers using the ProfitSword Business Intelligence Solution can capture vital revenue that may otherwise be lost. For an average select-service hotel earning $10 million annually, estimated recouped revenue translates into $834 of savings every month for a total of $10,000 per year. For the average full-service property earning $25 million annually, these savings can grow to as much as $2,000 each month, for a total additional profit of $24,000 each year.

Reducing IT Maintenance & Other Operational Costs

When implementing any software intended to be used by numerous individuals and property locations, hoteliers will naturally consider the cost implications of having to purchase multiple licenses. As a leading provider of business intelligence technology focusing on ensuring performance data transparency and communication, ProfitSword provides the ability for hotels to add an unlimited number of users at no additional cost. With each employee having different informational needs and areas of responsibility, varying data access levels can also be assigned at no extra charge to streamline operations further and ensure swift decision-making abilities. With the financial data necessary to operate a hotel business available in real-time within ProfitSword’s forecasting platform, hospitality professionals have the opportunity to reduce the number of licenses for other software tools, for example, a back-office accounting system.

When adopting the hosted, web-based ProfitSword BI Solution, hoteliers can also eliminate platform management costs while ensuring that additional tasks do not fall onto the shoulders of a hotel’s IT team. ProfitSword directly oversees any hosting, software updates, and new system integration needs. This means that a hotel business’ IT specialists and analysts can spend far less time managing and troubleshooting data management processes, with more time actually analyzing performance data to find ways of boosting profits. By fully automating IT-related processes, ProfitSword can save an average of ten hours per week in onsite IT support needs. When summed up for one year, this represents 520 hours saved in IT support. When making $20.00 per hour, a hotel’s IT specialists can not only make more efficient use of their time but can also create savings of $10,400.

Creating a Savings-oriented Business Intelligence Environment is Your Key to Financial Success

Few can argue against the fact that today’s hospitality industry is a fast-paced, ever- competitive environment where access to performance-based analytics makes all the difference in running a successful business. By removing barriers that traditionally limited timely access and the seamless sharing of such data, hoteliers can really begin to experience the multiple cost-saving benefits associated with an effective Business Intelligence Strategy. Being able to consistently rely on a steady stream of information that can be trusted to present an accurate, real-time representation of
finances, hoteliers will always be confident in their ability to steer the organization towards greater growth and profitability, regardless of any fluctuations in the market outlook.