The best ways to solve beverage alcohol management challenges without sacrificing consistency behind the bar.
You know the many challenges around managing a host of hotel properties. Balancing what makes your property unique with the overall brand identity, creating an environment that brings guests back time and time again, and ensuring amenities across the property meet your standards are just a few that you tackle daily. Included within these challenges is managing an effective alcohol program, especially when you offer unique bars, restaurants, event spaces, and room service options within a single location.
Pitfalls are present at every stage of beverage alcohol management – from ordering to analyzing data. Many traditional alcohol ordering and management processes waste significant amounts of time and money – manual payment processes, manual invoice entry, invoice reconciliation, credit recovery, collection of invoices across a property, inventory shortages, and alcohol invoice data research, just to name a few. Then there’s the lack of insight or control over alcohol ordering habits that affect brand consistency, guest experience, and your bottom line. Establishing brand consistency is crucial to creating the experience your guests have come to know and love, whether they’re in New York City or Jackson Hole. So, what is the best way to solve these challenges without sacrificing consistency behind the bar? The answer is simple – automate.
But how?
Order Efficiently
The way your team orders alcohol sets the pace for everything else. Implementing an ordering tool that supports your beverage alcohol program will ensure approved brands are being purchased and used, minimize split case fees and short orders, eliminate inefficient ordering habits, and reduce the time it takes to place orders. Today there are tools available that allow your food and beverage managers to place alcohol orders online in one single submission. Orders automatically route to each distributor while giving you control over things like order minimums, unapproved products, and split case fees. On-site purchasing departments can even place their own order requests within restricted parameters that you set. Getting visibility and control over the purchasing habits across your entire property is crucial so you can pivot quickly and reconcile faster.
Pay Digitally
Manually paying alcohol invoices is tedious, especially in the world of hotels. Many organizations send checks from the corporate office to each location to pay distributors. But, if a check doesn’t arrive on time, is made out incorrectly, or written for the wrong amount, the property, and in some instances, the entire company risks ending up on the no-sale list. Once you land on the no-sale list you can’t receive alcohol deliveries, your inventory will deplete, and the guest experience suffers. Implementing the use of a beverage alcohol management platform that offers automated payment for your alcohol invoices eliminates the need for checks and cash and allows your properties to keep payment terms with their distributors – keep your bars stocked and your guests happy.
Analyze Strategically
After your alcohol is delivered, multiple departments, like food and beverage, finance, and purchasing, need access to invoices and purchase data, often at the same time. Sorting through paper copies of invoices and delivering them to the right department at the right time is a painful process with a wide margin of error. If any of your properties rely on centralized accounting departments as opposed to dedicated AP staff at each hotel, there’s an additional step complicating visibility. Sure, you could send invoices to your off-site accounting team, but then your corporate purchasing department and on-site staff wouldn’t have the information they need, and you’d be wasting valuable time. So, move your invoices online! Digital invoicing and analytic reports resolve these issues, allowing multiple users across departments to access up-to-date alcohol information simultaneously.
Additionally, maintaining corporate-level visibility into the beverage alcohol programs across your company gives you a bird’s-eye view into things like purchase habits and product costs. This enables you to better maintain brand compliance and profitability across your entire company. When your corporate users can easily compare purchases made at each hotel using detailed analytic reports, they learn which programs are working and where to coach when necessary. Having instant access to actionable data at your fingertips can transform the way your business manages alcohol.
Fintech makes the process of automating your alcohol business easy. Like we said earlier, adopting a beverage alcohol management smart platform like Fintech simplifies alcohol management operations from payment through reconciliation and more. Our hotel clients report thousands of dollars identified and recouped by using Fintech, not to mention the time-savings on administrative and accounting labor. By automating a few key beverage alcohol management processes, Fintech can save you time and money too. Give time back to what matters – your guest experience.
Want to learn more about Fintech or the topics covered in this blog? Contact us today!
