The increasing number of suppliers emailing invoices and statements, which meant additional printing costs for the Hotel, and the need to have invoices approved by multiple people from within a universe of 160 employees, led to the implementation of PaperLess Document Management for Sage. A decision that made possible for the Hotel to automate invoice approval processes and reduce paper consumption by 65%, while experiencing significant time saving in the accounts department.

“The approvers in our business enjoy the ease of use of the system as well as having instant online access to all invoices relevant to them. The approval process for approvers is simply a click of a mouse!”

Alan Lynch, Fitzgeralds Woodlands House Hotel Financial Controller

Fitzgeralds Woodlands House Hotel is an Irish family owned Hotel & Leisure Centre with more than 30 years’ experience in the hotel industry. With approximately 160 employees the Hotel’s representatives were aiming to put an end to the manual approval of invoices by members of staff, which was very time-consuming and unprofessional, particularly when the approval process required multiple approvers.

In order to achieve these goals, the Hotel decided to implement PaperLess Document Management which besides offering a seamless integration with the Sage 50 software Woodlands Hotel had just implemented, also offered powerful document management features together with online invoice approval.  With the implementation of PaperLess for Sage, Hotel employees can now approve invoices online rather than having to do so manually i.e. at a time best suited to them, in a straight forward process with control levels that ensure no invoice is paid by the business without first being approved.

Powerful features that turned invoice approval into a fully transparent and more professional approval process, ensuring that no invoices are paid in error while, at the same time, giving users online access to all invoices they have approved. “The approvers in our business enjoy the ease of use of the system as well as having instant online access to all invoices relevant to them. The approval process for approvers is simply a click of a mouse!” says Alan Lynch, Financial Controller at Fitzgeralds Woodlands House Hotel.

Although clearly satisfied with the performance of PaperLess software, Alan Lynch feels that the benefits currently being experienced could have been felt sooner if the Hotel had opted for more than one full day onsite training and had provided a larger sample of invoices. This would have enabled Paperless training team to have set up all the relevant defaults and approvals on the system and on Sage, which would have enabled the business to resolve issues with recognizing supplier invoices while Paperless trainers were on site rather than having to require customer care assistance later.

“The feedback received from Fitzgeralds Woodlands House Hotel is in line with the high satisfaction levels of many other Hotels we have using PaperLess for Sage 50 and Sage 200 thought UK and Ireland” says Torben Halvorsen, co-owner of PaperLess Europe. With PaperLess Online Access the Hotel’s employees with responsibility for the ordering process can now finally have instant access to previous invoices, something that the hotels representatives consider to be of significant importance for the ordering process and that was an old claim which PaperLess helped to give answer to.

Additionally, the possibility to view documents directly from within PaperLess meant that review of management accounts and the preparation of budgets became easier, since the Hotel now has instant online access to invoices. For the Hotel representatives PaperLess introduced a powerful set of features that made access to historical invoices extremely easy, which has led to significant time savings for the Accounts Department and enabled individuals in the business with responsibility for purchasing to make decisions more quickly.

With an increasing number of clients from the Hospitality sector, Torben Halvorsen adds that “Hotels are implementing PaperLess not just to reduce time spent on manual data input but especially to have documents approved with ease and to retrieve old accounting information at the click of a button, something vital when dealing with a large number of suppliers and requesting budgets on a daily basis.”