Founded in 2010, Northwood Hospitality oversees and operates a growing portfolio of premier hotel assets, ranging from select-service to independent lifestyle hotels, all acquired by Northwood Investors.
The Challenges
Before adopting BirchStreet Pay, Northwood Hospitality’s team relied heavily on paper checks for 95% of their payments. The process often involved skilled accounts payable personnel manually handling tasks like check printing and envelope stamping.
Faced with these common challenges, they wanted to streamline the entire procurement workflow, minimize manual errors, and establish efficient communication between different departments and suppliers.
Wishlist
- Enhance overall efficiency and liberate staff from labor-intensive, manual tasks
- Transition suppliers to accept virtual cards, reducing the reliance on expensive paper checks
- Safeguard against fraud or overpayments
- Transform accounts payable from a cost center into a revenue generator, leveraging cash back and rebates
- Increase visibility and compliance, and improve spend control
The Solution
Determined to gain more control over their procurement spend, the team at Northwood recognized that automating the purchasing process could empower hotels to enforce spending limits, track expenses in real-time, and leverage spend analytics for cost-saving opportunities.
In the pursuit of the ideal solution for their extensive property portfolio, they conducted a thorough evaluation with BirchStreet Pay emerging as the preferred choice for procure-to-pay (P2P) automation.
The BirchStreet Pay solution not only aids Northwood Hospitality in reducing costs tied to manual data entry, paper-based invoices, checks, and payment errors, but it also fosters improved terms with vendors and suppliers, optimizes cash flow, and identifies potential savings opportunities.
This Pay solution seamlessly integrates with the company’s existing systems, ensuring a smooth data flow and real-time visibility. It complies with data privacy regulations, offering secure payment processing to mitigate the risk of fraud and data breaches. Additionally, the solution maintains detailed audit trails, facilitating compliance with both internal and external financial regulations.
Results
Northwood has successfully streamlined their invoicing, capturing and storing payment details while generating efficient payment files for vendors and suppliers. They also:
- Went from 95% manual check to 60% digital payments
- Received more than $300K annual cash back from vCard
- Saved 2,000+ back office hours
With payments centralized on a single platform, hotel staff can quickly create purchase orders, receive goods, and digitally match invoices, drastically reducing the need for manual data entry and reconciliation. This streamlined process empowers staff to dedicate more time to value-added activities, elevating overall productivity.
BirchStreet Pay goes beyond by providing robust reporting and analytics capabilities, enabling our Northwood clients to gain insights into payment trends and optimize their financial operations. The solution ensures industry-leading security measures to safeguard sensitive payment information and enhance compliance. These varied benefits collectively contribute to improved financial management, fortified supplier relationships, and streamlined operations.