Whether visitors want to relax on the beach, shop, or go screaming down waterslides, Innisfree Hotels caters to their dream vacation wishes. It’s a broad and complex operation. Properly balancing the hotel books and ensuring the accuracy of accounts might sound less exciting than miniature golf and swim-up bars, but they are an essential part of providing a fun and efficient guest experience.
Crucial to a smooth operation around the clock is Innisfree’s night auditors, who are the primary contacts for guests overnight and who are also tasked with reconciling accounts daily. Such varied responsibilities mean that this role requires access to accurate data and a streamlined process to manage it. This allows auditors to focus on late-night requests rather than administrative tasks.
Innisfree found its solution with Workday Extend.
Challenges night auditors face.
Innisfree’s night auditors collect, consolidate, and balance data daily. This data is then entered into Workday Financial Management, followed by an approval process and conversion into financial information. Dealing with inconsistent data exports from various systems (PMS, POS), the lack of control over data sent, and the need for manual entry took up a lot of time.
Third-party solutions had various issues. Most required the creation and maintenance of credentials. Also, setting up and onboarding a third-party solution could take weeks every time a new hotel opened. Additionally, data validation could be inaccurate, and Innisfree could not risk data export issues.
The night auditor role itself had limitations. Because it isn’t an accounting role, it couldn’t map to an accounting center’s expectations. Although the night auditors had data responsibility, they technically should not work directly in Workday Financials.
Finding a solution with Workday Extend.
Innisfree turned to Workday Extend to create an application allowing night auditors to input data without directly interacting with financials. The versatility of Workday Extend meant that Innisfree could build what it needed to meet its specific, unique challenges.
With Workday Extend, we can get more detailed data than with any other industry-specific system. It only presents options the night auditor can use. That was one of the most exciting things about the project.
Director of Platform Technology and Business Intelligence, Innisfree Hotels
Developers designed the Extend app’s interface to suit the needs of night auditors. The app simplifies the data entry process by presenting only the options relevant to the auditors’ tasks, reducing the chance for error and helping auditors complete their duties more quickly.
The solution improved operational efficiency by automating some of the night auditing processes, and it ensured that data met the required standards before being processed by the accounting center. The system could detect and quickly help solve mistakes. For example, if the night auditor went to the ledger screen and something didn’t add up, that auditor could find and resolve the variance by looking for any financial data that was not mapped properly.
A custom solution for unique challenges.
The Innisfree team invested in a discovery process before building the actual app. During development, Workday worked with Innisfree to ensure the app included essential functionality.
The resulting solution offers data ownership, the capability to create and translate new codes for new properties quickly, and nearly live data reporting. These features allow for better data stewardship and future usability.
Building a foundation for growth.
Built into the solution were safeguards such as two-step verification for accuracy. Because Extend was built on Workday security, data validation and access were no longer concerns.
The app is built on Workday security. So, it’s all role-based access. You want to set up a new hotel, define some mappings, and assign role-based security, and that hotel is live on the app. No code.
Senior Principal Technical Consultant, Workday
The system was built with flexibility and compatibility, allowing it to adapt to new features in Workday. Best of all, it laid the groundwork for Innisfree to scale.