Lark Hotels and Hotel Investor Apps: Operational Transformation and Employee Empowerment

OPERATIONS

Lark Hotels, a management group for small luxury and boutique hotels, was growing quickly due to their reputation for expertise in the segment, ownership mentality, and innovative ideas. However, while driving a strong ROI to their 50+ destination properties, behind the scenes they were challenged by a slow and tedious accounting system that required operational workarounds, additional staff-hours, and obscured visibility into their financials.

Why it matters: After seeking a new solution with Hotel Investor Apps, ERP & Accounting Software, everything changed. The time savings, visibility, and automations that came out of the partnership were transformational. Not only that – but some things that Lark Hotels did not expect started to change as well. Employees who had been overburdened with manual processes started contributing at a higher level due to the time savings from the reduction in manual processes. Lark was able to elevate job roles and see increased productivity, creativity, and empowerment in their employees. This is the story of how it happened and the results they experienced.

With HIA’s advanced ERP & Accounting software, Lark Hotels was able to both streamline and enhance their processes. The impact of these changes has reverberated throughout the organization. Benefits have included increased speed and efficiency, better reporting, tighter integrations, more engaged employees, elevated job roles, and a foundation for continued improvement.

Top 3 Core Objectives: While externally delivering great results to their owners through management, property renovations and repositionings, and driving ROI; internally, Lark was working double-time to make up for the problems and deficiencies with their back-office accounting software.

Lack of Visibility: With limited users allowed in the accounting system, the necessary details and insights were not readily accessible to all stakeholders. This slowed down management’s decision-making and was a hurdle to their ROI focus.
Operational Workarounds: The deficiencies in the accounting system required the teams to do extra work to get the information they needed.
Extra Staffing: Similarly, the manual processes, slowness, inefficiencies and workarounds meant extra labor.

Innovators Mentioned

Lark Hotels

Hotel Investor Apps

Scot Hopps

VP Operations

Lark Hotels

"I just found HIA to be super easy to figure out and it also allows us to clean things up easily. Being able to make changes quickly is tremendous. Something that could have been hours of work before and it’s now scaled down to five minutes and 30 seconds, it’s great."

Scot Hopps

VP Operations

👍 VP Operations Scot Hopps said that HIA Accounting is easy to use and offers huge time savings.:

"I just found HIA to be super easy to figure out and it also allows us to clean things up easily. Being able to make changes quickly is tremendous. Something that could have been hours of work before and it’s now scaled down to five minutes and 30 seconds, it’s great."

⚖️ The selection process: During their research process, Scot Hopps evaluated Hotel Investor Apps's product differentiators, customer support, and holistic value as a strategic partner and ultimately decided that Hotel Investor Apps was the best fit solution:

VP Operations Scot Hopps said, about their decision: "I think the best example of how HIA has been transformative is that we have been able to restructure. Before we were using HIA, we were just adding people – we just needed to add hours. And what’s changed? It’s that some of those people we added in that capacity, have actually elevated their roles, two of which are now Assistant Controllers in the department. Rather than everybody essentially doing all pretty much the same work, now we’re able to layer levels of oversight and specialization. And that helps the individual who’s growing up within our organization. That allows them to teach and train back within the team. That allows them to look with a little bit of distance and higher purpose and audit the information, to look for opportunities to improve our organizational structure and training. Now when somebody joins our accounting team, they see that they might have a progression to other roles without leaving the company. And I can see the direct connection between these two pieces, and that is HIA."

📈 The results: Together HIA and Lark Hotels worked to onboard and switch over the 50-hotel portfolio and to put processes in place so that Lark Hotels could say goodbye to their previous accounting system challenges.

Increased Access & Visibility: With unlimited users, Lark added 100+ employees in the system, providing access to real-time performance data on a property and portfolio level, according to their user roles.
Full Reporting and Personalized Dashboards: Direct insights into trends and performance at both a property and a portfolio-level. This meant that Lark Hotels had automatic imports of PMS and POS data and could replace manual entry with automations. Additionally, HIA offered automatic scheduling and sends of the daily report, so that all key players could stay in the know.
Custom Integrations: At Lark’s request HIA built a new integrations for Clock PMS (completing the integration quickly in 8 weeks), Lightspeed POS, as well as automated Accounts Payable through the Factura.ai integration (to automate invoice processing and code directly into HIA).