Hotel finance teams have the opportunity to drive innovation and excellence by optimising costs while ensuring financial accuracy and operational efficiency.
By embracing advanced financial strategies and technologies, they can effectively manage rising operational expenses, adapt to fluctuating occupancy rates, and streamline complex financial workflows.
This proactive approach not only enhances profitability but also maintains the highest standards of service quality.
The key lies in strategic cost management, which involves leveraging automation, streamlining financial operations, and ensuring seamless data integration across systems.
In this guide, we will explore practical, finance-driven strategies to reduce costs, minimise inefficiencies, and enhance financial control—without compromising accuracy or compliance.
The Cost Challenges of Legacy Finance Systems
Many hotels have the exciting opportunity to upgrade their finance systems to meet the fast-paced demands of today’s hospitality sector. By adopting modern, efficient solutions, they can enhance their financial operations and stay ahead in a competitive market.
Legacy systems create inefficiencies that drive up costs, such as:
- Manual Data Entry: Staff spend hours reconciling transactions, processing invoices, and generating reports. This increases labour costs and the risk of errors.
- Disconnected Systems: Finance, reservations, procurement, payroll and other back-office systems often operate in silos, leading to time wastage due to manual data entry and making it hard to get a real-time view of financial performance.
- Limited Reporting: Outdated systems make it challenging to track profitability, manage cash flow or identify areas for cost savings.
- High Maintenance Costs: Older software requires ongoing IT support, expensive upgrades, and custom integrations just to stay functional.
- Unnecessary Features and Costs: Many legacy systems include outdated or redundant functionalities that add complexity without delivering real value. Additionally, hotels often pay inflated licencing fees due to long-standing contracts with rigid pricing structures.
For hotels operating on tight margins, these inefficiencies add up quickly.
That is where UniFi and SunSystems from FinanSys come in.
SunSystems provides comprehensive financial accounting management that can help your hotel to simplify complex financial operations, reduce manual workloads, access data quickly, and improve decision-making.
Paired with UniFi—a powerful platform for accounting, finance, and business process automation—you can achieve even greater efficiency, automation, and control.
Automating Finance: Lower Costs, Better Control
Here is how finance teams can reduce costs:
1. Connecting Finance to Core Business Systems
Hotels rely on multiple systems for reservations, procurement, payroll, and expenses.
When these systems cannot communicate, finance teams spend unnecessary time consolidating information from different sources.
UniFi acts as a central hub by integrating SunSystems with other software in your hotel ecosystem to create a smooth data flow.
This reduces errors, speeds up reconciliations, and ensures financial reports are always up to date.
UniFi integrates with any system via API using its powerful data connector tool.
It is a middleware that can automatically pull and send data by connecting various business systems that support API, providing a single source of truth for financial data.
Instead of juggling multiple spreadsheets or manually reconciling transactions, finance teams get a unified, real-time view of hotel performance.
UniFi also automates data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL), ensuring seamless movement of financial data across departments with minimal effort.
Whether it is pulling revenue figures from a booking system or payroll data from an HR platform, UniFi standardises and delivers the data in a ready-to-use format.
2. Automating Manual Processes
Many hotel finance teams spend significant time on manual processes like invoice processing, reconciliations, and reporting.
UniFi automates these tasks, cutting processing time from hours to minutes. This means finance teams can focus on higher-value activities.
UniFi offers two types of process automation to help hotel finance teams work more efficiently: Automation Processes and Autonomous Processes.
Automation Processes assist Full, Credit, or Bot users by enhancing efficiency through features like:
- Calculation Engine – Automates financial calculations like room revenue allocations.
- Process/Workflow Engine – Ensures approval workflows for expenses, purchase orders, and invoices run smoothly, reducing bottlenecks.
- Accounting Automation Engine – Speeds up tasks like reconciliations, journal postings, and inter-company transactions.
Autonomous Processes are the next evolutionary stage of automation processes. These are fully managed by bots that perform tasks without the need for interaction by a human user, freeing time for strategic work.
This allows you to achieve more without increasing headcount or having your finance team spend time on repetitive tasks.
For example, transactions can be automatically initiated at predefined times, such as every Monday at 9 AM or on the first day of each month.
You can schedule an invoice to be sent to a specific supplier for a set amount on the last day of each month or automate the upload of currency exchange rates to SunSystems daily at 8 AM, for example.
There are many other autonomous processes that can be entirely handled by bots, enabling you to free up resources for higher value tasks.
3. Faster Decision-Making with Real-Time Insights
Hotel profitability depends on fast, informed decisions. Limited reporting capabilities make it difficult for finance teams to track key performance indicators (KPIs), analyse costs, or forecast revenue effectively.
SunSystems, combined with UniFi’s business intelligence and data management capabilities, provides real-time reporting and analytics without any delay when accessing key financial data, making it easier to manage budgets and control costs.
Finance teams can access detailed financial insights and performance metrics, helping them identify cost-saving opportunities and make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Thanks to advanced reporting capabilities, it is easier for finance teams to track KPIs, analyse costs, and forecast revenue effectively.
4. Reducing Errors and Fraud Risks
Automating data entry can significantly reduce the risk of costly mistakes, ensuring accurate payments, preventing duplicate invoices, and improving cash flow management.
With automated controls and real-time tracking, SunSystems combines with UniFi to ensure transactions are accurate and compliant.
Built-in approval workflows and advanced audit trails also help prevent fraud.
5. Cutting IT and Maintenance Costs
Investing in modern software solutions can eliminate the need for costly upgrades, reduce the demand for ongoing IT support, and simplify integrations, leading to more efficient operations and reduced expenses.
With UniFi and SunSystems, hotels can reduce reliance on outdated systems by moving to a modern, scalable financial platform that delivers more features at a lower cost.
This reduces IT overhead and maintenance costs and ensures the finance function operates efficiently without unexpected system failures.
6. Reducing Time Wastage in Financial Processes
Streamlining financial processes can enhance efficiency, ensure consistency, and save valuable time.
For example, streamlined reconciliation of accounts across multiple locations and seamless management of multi-currency transactions can streamline operations and minimise errors.
With UniFi, hotels can automate reconciliations, standardise workflows, and simplify multi-entity and multi-currency management. This means finance teams spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on strategic financial planning.
Smarter Cost Management Without Compromising Control
By adopting the above approach, hotel finance teams can significantly reduce costs while preserving — and even strengthening — financial control.
UniFi and SunSystems provide the platforms to streamline financial operations, save time, and gain full control over hotel finances—helping finance teams drive profitability without compromising guest experience.
Want to learn how UniFi can help your hotel save time and money? Get in touch with our team today.
