About
Dalwadi Hospitality Management, LLC is an experienced full-service hospitality management firm offering comprehensive solutions for quality hospitality properties from end to end. The firm offers a range of boutique services to help property owners, both new and experienced, with streamlining their property investment process. This includes support with acquiring, building, and managing hotel properties.
Sumit Dalwadi
President, Dalwadi Hospitality Management
The challenge
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the back-office team at Dalwadi Hospitality Management included one finance controller, a director of operations, and a sales manager. At that time, they were using cloud-based hotel-specific accounting software to manage their portfolio of hotel properties. They were not necessarily satisfied with their current solution, but since it was considered industry-standard software, they were convinced to use it. Their current solution had many shortcomings as it felt archaic in manually processing account (AP) transactions by keying financial information into the system and no automated bank feed. This also created a lot of work for the team to spend additional hours cross-checking their work. The entire process was inefficient and time-consuming. Fast forward to when COVID-19 spread across the U.S., which impacted the entire world. Sumit Dalwadi stepped in to manage the accounting back-office due to workforce changes, including his finance controller’s departure. With a reduced workforce, Sumit Dawadi was left to manage the entire back-office operations on his own on top of running operations for the entire business.
Sumit expedited his search for a better solution as his books fell behind across multiple hotel properties. He found a hotel accounting software that seemed promising in its offerings. The solution promised to get his books cleaned up in 30 days and deliver automated accounting workflows, so he decided to try them. He realized quickly that the solution was not automated after all since it required a team of people to process most steps of the accounting process. In addition, their promise to get his books caught up in 30 days turned into four to five months and counting. It became a frustrating experience for Sumit since it’s not easy to transition and implement a new solution, let alone a solution that he immediately started having buyer’s remorse for since it didn’t provide true automation.
The solution
Dalwadi Hospitality Management couldn’t afford to waste more time with an underperforming solution. As the tax filing deadline approached, Sumit urgently sought a new alternative. Remembering his encounter with Docyt at a past industry event, Sumit reached out to learn more. Having been through the same experience, he exercised caution and initially felt hesitant about Docyt’s offering as an automated accounting platform. However, his perception changed when he witnessed the AI and automation capabilities during a live demo. Every step, from AI-driven extraction of invoice data to the auto-categorization of expenses into the correct chart of accounts (CoA) and performing real-time bank reconciliation by auto-matching transactions to a live bank feed, was flawlessly executed by the AI. Encouraged by positive feedback from several of Docyt’s references, which added to their credibility, Sumit decided to move forward with Docyt.
The results
$10k
Recovered
After implementing Docyt, Sumit and his team of general managers experienced significant improvements. At first, it was a learning curve to see the system truly automate the AP expense management process, as they were accustomed to reviewing and processing invoices. With Docyt’s AI-powered Auto-Pilot feature that auto-matches and auto-categorizes expenses enabling automated reconciliation, Sumit and his team regained valuable time to concentrate on other strategic initiatives aimed at business growth. With Docyt’s automation in place, they also uncovered duplicate and excess bank charges and loan discrepancies in the books, with almost $10,000 of expenditures and duplicates that Sumit could return to the bank institutions to get a refund.
The team also leveraged Docyt’s real-time USALI and departmental reports, where they could see and understand the cost distribution in a particular department, enabling the team to forecast and budget for upcoming months.
Docyt's advanced reporting: Get real-time USALI reports
Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, Dalwadi Management handled all bookkeeping tasks internally, allowing them to get daily updates on their business’s financials and operational metrics. However, during and after the pandemic, their bookkeeping fell significantly behind, affecting multiple business entities and straining their relationships with banks and partners. Fortunately, by implementing Docyt, they were able to reverse the situation and get their books back on track. This improvement alleviated the strain on their relationships with banks and partners. Moreover, with the adoption of AI-powered and automated bookkeeping, they now enjoy consistent up-to-date books across multiple hotel properties, eliminating the need to wait until month-end to close the books.
Docyt got my books back on track in 45 days across 7 hotel properties with over three months of catch-up.
Sumit Dalwadi
President, Dalwadi Hospitality Management
