Best Western Premier Resort Cuts Monthly Close in Half, Saves 20 Hours a Week

The BW Premier Collection by Best Western is a group of carefully curated hotels with identities tied to the unique personality of each hotel’s location. For the Best Western Premier Grand Canyon Squire Inn, the location is a World Heritage site with more than 6 million visitors annually. Located near Grand Canyon National Park, the Grand Canyon Squire Inn is a resort-style hotel with 318 rooms, three restaurants, bars, lounges, indoor and outdoor pools, a bowling center, a coffee shop, a gift shop, and more.

It’s no small task to manage and report on the accounting and finance processes for a property of the Grand Canyon Squire Inn’s size and complexity, especially without the right technology to automate and streamline the effort. Because they were working with a legacy accounting system and relying on manual reconciliations, it would take the resort’s accounting team as many as 10 days each month to close the books.

“We had to re-enter data multiple times into multiple systems as part of the close,” says Marti Olson, director of finance at the Grand Canyon Squire Inn. “The repetitive processes and lack of automation and integration meant that we were wasting as much as two weeks of the team’s time each month.”The resort’s accounting staff couldn’t begin processing the current month until the previous one was closed, so they began each month already two weeks behind schedule.

“It took me an entire day just to handle the income journals and revenue transfers,” says Alicia Sheppard, accounting department manager at the Grand Canyon Squire Inn. “Payroll journal entry took another four hours of work.”

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