Highlights
Industry: Hospitality
Solution: Automation tool to upload transaction files into Sage 300
Results: Significant time & cost savings
Challenge
Based in Singapore, the client is a leading industry player that manages its portfolio of luxury resorts in the Indian Ocean, offering guests and other stakeholders a choice of popular destinations. Updating its multitude of daily transactions from many resorts into its accounting system has been a constant challenge for the client.
Traditionally, the client’s Front Office system in each resort manages the front-of-house operations, back-office operations and restaurants, while the Material Control system manages purchasing, inventory and costing information in daily operations. Every day, the finance team has to manually update each resort’s daily transaction figures into the Sage 300 (formerly Sage ERP Accpac) accounting system to analyse them and generate monthly management reports including profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow statements. Due to the voluminous incoming transaction records from multiple resorts − such as billing, purchasing and inventory − the daily updating process is tedious, time-consuming and prone to human errors.
Seeking a solution that would enable seamless updating of transactions, the client turned to
Stone Forest IT (SFIT) to review its processes for automation opportunities.
Solution
With an understanding of the client’s work processes and pain points, SFIT proposed for the Front Office and Material Control systems to generate daily transactions in a “.csv” file format that are saved in the client’s File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server. In addition, an automation tool is introduced to upload these transaction files directly into the Sage 300 Accounts Payable and General Ledger modules at a specified time. This solution has significantly reduced man-hours spent by 50% and improved resource utilisation.
Results
With the improved system in place, the finance team only has to verify the transactions once in the morning. Typographical errors have also been greatly reduced, allowing the client to realise significant time and cost savings. The successful deployment is a result of SFIT’s extensive experience in providing
customised solutions for Sage 300 to match organisations’ business needs and improve work productivity.