How Bluegrass Hotels leveraged Docyt AI to save time and automate their expense management

About

Bluegrass Hotels is a hotel and restaurant management business that has been in operation for 32 years. They proudly own and operate properties across the Southeast. They provide various services, including ongoing hotel management, development and renovation oversight, turnaround of distressed assets, and primarily asset management and ownership.

The challenge

Meet Jatin K. Shah, Bluegrass Hotels’ CEO, and owner. His expertise lies in managing the overall day-to-day operations and making crucial decisions across all aspects of the business, including investments. However, his team faced a pressing challenge: the internal finance department spent a staggering 100 hours each month managing expenses across multiple properties using a highly manual process. This involved painstakingly reviewing expenses, handling stacks of paper receipts, manually entering data into spreadsheets, and reconciling expenses by downloading credit card and bank statements, then matching them individually.

Notably, credit card expenses alone soared between $300,000 and $400,000, as 25 employees used their company credit cards for purchases. This didn’t even account for all the other business expenses that required tracking and reconciliation, hinting at the massive workload the team dealt with monthly.

Adding to the predicament, they implemented a specific accounting solution that was required by their hotel partners. For six months, Jatin and his internal finance team ran into a lot of challenges. His team found it difficult to adopt it because it wasn’t intuitive and user-friendly. For example, applying simple changes to their financial records within the system typically resulted in a very convoluted process that required additional customer support, which they didn’t receive, leading to a lot of internal friction and delays.

Consequently, generating a monthly financial report for their individual companies became an arduous task. This, in turn, hindered them from promptly providing their monthly financial reports to their banks. Jatin had no time to spare with his bank’s requirements and requests so he was determined to find another solution quickly. In search of a new solution, Jatin aimed to find an accounting software that provided industry-standard financial reporting that would not only meet the banks’ requirement for getting timely financial reports, but also provide his internal finance team with easy access to industry-specific real-time financial reports.

The solution

Jatin discovered Docyt at a hospitality industry conference. The Docyt team gave a live demonstration of the platform’s accounting capabilities for automating expense management, revenue reconciliation, and generating financial reports. Jatin was impressed with Docyt AI and its enterprise-grade capabilities to handle repetitive and time-consuming workflows in real time, and for multiple businesses.

One particular feature that stood out to Jatin was the seamless integration with live bank and credit card feeds. This connectivity enabled a hassle-free and automated option for importing statements into the platform. Even more remarkable was Docyt AI, which automatically reconciled these statements with uploaded expenses saving valuable time and effort on manual reconciliations. This meant that Jatin and his team could streamline their process and reduce administrative and bookkeeping burdens. Recognizing the potential to increase his team’s efficiency and get instant insights into his businesses’ financial performance, Jatin decided to give Docyt a try.

Docyt AI Powering Continuous Bank Reconciliation

The results

> 50%

Reduction in hours spent reviewing expenses

The implementation of Docyt brought remarkable transformations to Bluegrass Hotels’ financial operations. Across their six hotel and restaurant properties, the team experienced a significant 50% reduction in the hours spent on reviewing and reconciling all business expenses. Notably, this positive impact extended to Jatin Shah, who also spent his weekends cross-checking his businesses’ financial records for accuracy. With Docyt, he no longer had to sacrifice his weekends as everything was done in real-time and with precision because of the platform’s AI. Jatin was able to get his weekends back, which made his life much easier.

The internal finance and accounting team at Bluegrass Hotels also expressed their delight with the platform’s user-friendly interface, addressing a major pain point they previously dealt with during the onboarding process or when troubleshooting their previous accounting solution. For example, when it comes to uploading business expenses, they can easily do this through various methods such as emailing, uploading files from their computers, or taking snapshots of any paper receipts and/or invoices using Docyt’s Mobile App feature. Additionally, the team no longer had to manually reconcile transactions against their company’s bank statements since Docyt AI manages this process in real-time. Docyt also connects with its various property management (PMS) systems, making it easy for the system to automatically pull in financial data to perform continuous reconciliation of its revenue data with a connected bank feed. As a result, Docyt is able to provide real-time financial reporting, leading to significant time savings. Previously, the Bluegrass finance team spent half their time pulling these financial reports manually.

Docyt's Mobile App for easy receipt uploads

The Docyt Mobile App was another indispensable feature for Jatin, enabling him to approve expenses within minutes. Whether he was traveling, at home, or in the office, he had instant visibility into all the expenses and received instant notifications for new expenses submitted into the system that he could immediately approve using the mobile app.

Jatin and his internal finance team now experience the benefits of accurate and instant financial reporting across their extensive hotel portfolio. The platform’s seamless integration and powerful automation removed the burdensome tasks of doing manual reviews, cross-checking financial records across multiple businesses, and empowering the team to redirect their efforts to more strategic initiatives. In addition, now that they are armed with instant insights from Docyt’s financial reports, they can confidently plan and make informed decisions that will drive the continued growth of Bluegrass Hotels.