The challenge
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the back-office team at Dalwadi Hospitality Management included one finance controller, a director of operations, and a sales manager. At that time, they were using cloud-based hotel-specific accounting software to manage their portfolio of hotel properties. They were not necessarily satisfied with their current solution, but since it was considered industry-standard software, they were convinced to use it. Their current solution had many shortcomings as it felt archaic in manually processing accounts payable (AP) transactions by keying financial information into the system and no automated bank feed. This also created a lot of work for the team to spend additional hours cross-checking their work. The entire process was inefficient and time-consuming. Fast forward to when COVID-19 spread across the U.S., which impacted the entire world. Sumit Dalwadi stepped in to manage the accounting back-office due to workforce changes, including his finance controller’s departure. With a reduced workforce, Sumit Dalwadi was left to manage the entire back-office operations on his own on top of running operations for the entire business.
Sumit expedited his search for a better solution as his books fell behind across multiple hotel properties. He found a hotel accounting software that seemed promising in its offerings. The solution promised to get his books cleaned up in 30 days and deliver automated accounting workflows, so he decided to try them. He realized quickly that the solution was not automated after all since it required a team of people to process most steps of the accounting process. In addition, their promise to get his books caught up in 30 days turned into four to five months and counting. It became a frustrating experience for Sumit since it’s not easy to transition and implement a new solution, let alone a solution that he immediately started having buyer’s remorse for since it didn’t provide true automation.
The solution
The tax deadline was closing in, and Sumit had already been burned once by an “automated” accounting platform. So when he reached out to Docyt, a company he’d met at an industry event, he came in skeptical.
Then he saw the live demo. Invoices he used to key in by hand were read and entered by AI in seconds. Expenses landed in the right chart of accounts automatically. Bank transactions matched themselves against a live feed, with no hours of cross-checking. For the first time, Sumit saw a way to get his books current across every property without hiring a team to do it.
Invoice Queue
Bank Transactions
Accounting Suite: Docyt AI reads and codes invoices, then matches every bank transaction
to a live feed, across every property.
What sealed the deal? Talking directly with Docyt’s customers. After hearing their success stories, Sumit partnered with Docyt to bring real automation to Dalwadi Hospitality’s back office.
The results
After implementing Docyt, Sumit and his team of general managers experienced significant improvements. At first, it was a learning curve to see the system truly automate the AP expense management process, as they were accustomed to reviewing and processing invoices. Now, Docyt’s AI agents match, categorize, and reconcile expenses in real time. That gives Sumit’s team time back to focus on strategic work that grows the business. With Docyt’s automation in place, they also uncovered duplicate and excess bank charges and loan discrepancies in the books, with almost $10,000 of expenditures and duplicates that Sumit could return to the bank institutions to get a refund.
The team also leveraged Docyt’s real-time USALI and departmental reports, where they could see and understand the cost distribution in a particular department, enabling the team to forecast and budget for upcoming months.
Departmental profit is $341,880 for September, up 7.0% on last year. Rooms revenue grew 6.0% while rooms expenses rose only 3.2%.
Business Intelligence Suite: Departmental P&L Report
Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, Dalwadi Management handled all bookkeeping tasks internally, allowing them to get daily updates on their business’s financials and operational metrics. However, during and after the pandemic, their bookkeeping fell significantly behind, affecting multiple business entities and straining their relationships with banks and partners. Fortunately, by implementing Docyt, they were able to reverse the situation and get their books back on track. This improvement alleviated the strain on their relationships with banks and partners. Moreover, with the adoption of AI-powered and automated bookkeeping, they now enjoy consistent up-to-date books across multiple hotel properties, eliminating the need to wait until month-end to close the books.