10 week deployment builds scale, cuts costs and drives sustainability for boutique hotel group.

Percipient, a specialist provider of cloud-based financial management & accounting software, today announced that luxury boutique hotel group, Dakota Hotels, has gone live with Sage Intacct. Following a rapid deployment which took just 10 weeks, the hotel group is already benefitting from more time to focus on innovation, as well as reduced costs, increased sustainability, and better resource allocation across the group’s five hotels in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester.

Having acquired two new hotels in 2020, Dakota’s existing Sage 50 solution could no longer keep pace with the needs of the business. With a business model that sees individual hotels running their own P&L, the new platform needed to be cloud-based, and support a multi-entity model, providing autonomy while delivering consolidation, reporting and intelligence at a group level.

Dakota Hotels selected Sage Intacct based on its ease of use, dashboards and reporting, value and scale, while Percipient was chosen on the basis of its impressive credentials in hospitality, and as Sage’s Intacct’s UK partner of the year.

“Percipient really did bring so much value to this project,” Sam Hartley, finance director, Dakota Hotels, comments. “The team’s knowledge of the hospitality industry and experience of similar Sage Intacct deployments meant that we were incredibly focused on our project goals, and went live within just a few months. The setup of the system was fairly straightforward, helped hugely by the cloud deployment model. And Percipient’s Cloud Connect API-led integration technology, which allowed Sage Intacct to easily integrate with Dakota’s other core systems, including PMS and procurement platforms, was also key.”

“Using Sage Intacct, we can manipulate data by an inordinate number of categories, by hotel, department, floor, room or time period,” Sam explains. “At any given point we have access to one version of the truth, and can spot anomalies, patterns or opportunities. The value of this real-time insight is that problems can be headed off before they become business risks, and opportunities can be leveraged to drive increased service or profitability while the window is most open. We also have a live group position which was difficult to achieve before, as the process relied upon input from each of the hotels. “

A good example of this value in practice is around Dakota Hotels’ labour planning KPIs. Labour challenges as a result of both Brexit and the pandemic have resulted in the group having to be creative in the way resources are deployed. Live visibility of rotas mean that the management team can prioritise, redeploy and bridge gaps in order to uphold services and maintain standards which is vital for a brand built upon service and sincerity.

Sustainability is another key area we’ve been able to address using the system, as Sam explains: “Using sensors and meters, we collect data from a range of areas, and Sage Intacct contextualises and presents this insight to key roles around the business, from maintenance team personnel to hotel managers. The granularity of this information means that we can compare trends, review both our electricity costs and consumption, and make adjustments, which benefit both the bottom line and our sustainability credentials.”

“As well as being able to demonstrate our initiative to an increasingly environmentally-conscious consumer, we have been able to reduce our energy bills by tens of thousands of pounds each year. At a time where costs are under close scrutiny this has been incredibly welcome as both a short term saving as well as a long term one. As we move increasingly towards renewable energy usage, the system will be crucial in evaluating its value against other sources.”