Client Group based in Europe owning Chain of Hotels, Real Estate & Restaurants

Background:

• The client is in the business of acquiring residential & commercial properties including running hotels and refurbish /transform them either to resell or revamp the business to operate as their own.

Client’s concerns:

• Absence of management information despite the Head of accounts & his team always worked up, burning mid-night oil & in firefighting mode. They occasionally produced quarterly Profit and loss statements with 2 to 3 months delay in excel with very low reliability.
• Upon review, we noted many issues including –
  • Each acquired business continued to run on different accounting systems & Chart of Accounts
  • Multiple Front desk systems & manual accounting without interface
  • Skill Gap among the accounting team
  • Finance function Ill-equipped to handle the rapid increase in volume

Solutions offered and successfully implemented by us:

• Coordinated with each front desk vendor to set up an End-of-day interface with Main Accounting System on Winbooks.
• Created a Master COA and mapped all different Chart of Accounts to bring uniformity in reporting & facilitate consolidation.
• Designed a new action-oriented Management Reporting format backed by an input spreadsheet template to download /upload multiple Trial Balances therein. The rest of the reporting was automated.
• Conducted a process mapping of all the activities within the finance function, re-engineered the processes.
• Using a virtual invoicing program, we outsourced activities including processing of voluminous supplier invoices to a remote location in India.
• Filled the skill gap in the accounting function by providing other outsourcing support for monthly Account closing, Management Reporting, Budgeting, etc from a remote location in India at a much lesser cost.