October 14, 2019 – In the face of growing business complexity, Benchmark Global Hospitality has leveraged Sage Intacct to seamlessly manage financials across an environment of over 50 properties and 80 entities. Benchmark has moved to online invoice approvals, electronic signatures, and a more paperless environment, cutting cumbersome processes and time from one hour to five minutes.
Benchmark, a global hospitality company, provides more than 50 hotel and resort owners with services that include: hotel management, sales and marketing, food and beverage, health and wellness, design and construction, and IT and asset management.
A pivotal moment in Benchmark’s evolution came when the organization merged in 2016 with Gemstone, a full-service hotel management company specializing in upscale hotels and resorts. The newly merged company needed to consolidate financial management on a single platform and faced a decision: Benchmark ran on a hospitality-specific accounting and financial reporting solution, while Gemstone had been running Sage Intacct since 2008.
“Gemstone had good experiences with Sage Intacct while Benchmark had challenges with Aptech, especially with its business intelligence component,” said Brett Atkinson, formerly Gemstone’s CFO and today the SVP of Finance at Benchmark. “The dual capabilities of Sage Intacct and ProfitSword integrated together made the decision really easy for the combined entity.”
After implementing Sage Intacct, Benchmark Global Hospitality realized significant benefits, including:
- Seamless, simple multi-entity management: The 10,000-person company can easily manage financials across a complex environment of over 50 properties and 80 entities. Sage Intacct’s capabilities for multi-entity consolidation have also simplified how Benchmark rolls up results across the organization. In addition, new entities can be set-up on the system in two days, versus the four weeks it used to take.
- Automated accounts payable processes: By moving to online invoice approvals, electronic signatures, and a more paperless environment with Sage Intacct, Benchmark was able to reallocate one-half of a full-time accounting resource at 40 of its locations who were previously dedicated to AP work to higher value tasks and customer service. That amounts to 20 property-level FTEs across the company. Plus, user satisfaction has risen markedly with Sage Intacct.
- New insights into portfolio performance: The combination of Sage Intacct and ProfitSword enables Benchmark to make more informed decisions at the corporate, departmental, and property levels. Daily information from properties, including occupancy and profitability, are fed into ProfitSword and then into Sage Intacct, allowing detailed reporting in either system.
“Every time we encounter a complexity in our business, we quickly find there’s a way to solve it with Sage Intacct,” Atkinson says. “If we have to accommodate consolidations with 10 layers of partnerships, we don’t worry about whether Sage Intacct can handle it because it’s so easy to use.”
For more information on how Benchmark Global Hospitality uses Sage Intacct, view the full case study.