Effective Budgeting Strategies for Hospitality Organizations

Marc Moskowitz: Excellent. And we know that ultimately you selected Workday Adaptive Planning to drive your planning, forecasting, reporting. We've had the great opportunity to work with you throughout the years with your implementations and optimizations. Maybe if you can share with this group, what were some of the factors that led you to choose EisnerAmper and Workday Adaptive Planning, but more importantly, what sort of led you to continue to use those solutions?

Amanda Epstein: Sure. So the budget process here was very, very tedious. It would take us anywhere from four to six months to complete. We did a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of worksheets, even trying to join 'em together into one combined workbook with VBA scripting. We still had users that would make copies of it and we'd have various versions of it out there that we ultimately then would have to recombine and in addition to those workbooks that we were doing our budget in, a lot of other outlets and departments would want additional analysis outside of that. So we'd have those worksheets working as well that they would utilize and then build their own. And we were trying to incorporate everything back together. So it would take quite a while to get that accomplished and there was no single source of truth. So we were really seeking a solution that everyone could participate at once without it blogging down or erroring out because there was multiple people trying to save the same document. And when we found Workday Adaptive, EisnerAmper was recommended as our integration specialist and I have worked with them ever since on upgrades and various things, and we continue to use it because we've gotten a lot of user adoption with it because we're putting all the information the user needs to understand where they're at, what they're trending at, and what their key performance indicators really are at their fingertips. We create their own dashboards so they can quickly reference what they need in order to input their forecast numbers individually.

Marc Moskowitz: Super. You've talked a little bit in answering the question some of the benefits, but if you could maybe highlight maybe one or two key benefits that come to mind for you that you were able to achieve as part of this transformation.

Amanda Epstein: One of the key benefits was really having the users own their budget. Because previously I would meet with each one of them and it was me taking detailed notes on why I was inputting something the way I was, and somebody ultimately didn't remember what was said or how we came to get to the number we did. And so within Workday Adaptive, they're able to make their own notes on their own sheets. We can reference those notes, we can put 'em on the reports, we can put 'em in cells, and they can become a historical reference for why it was that we trended what we did. Also make additional rows that roll up to the value so that we can really section out the reason we're building the number that we're building in that monthly budget number. So that was one of our key benefits was really getting people to own what they're inputting and how they want to control their budget and forecasting going forward.

Marc Moskowitz: Super. And I know when you go into a solution like this, you certainly are very organized and Prairie Brand is very organized with the outcomes that you were looking to achieve. Were there any unexpected outcomes that resulted from the transformation that maybe originally you didn't contemplate?

Amanda Epstein: Absolutely. So when we first started with Adaptive, it was on a monthly time strata, and as things got upgraded throughout the years, we were able to transition to a daily time strata. So our daily operating report, we were able to get implemented into Adaptive, and because of the ease of the integrations, we were able to set up to where we were integrating with our data warehouse. So all of our KPIs were feeding through automatically and everyone has at their fingertips within hours where we currently stand and how we're growing towards that budgeted number at the end of the day. So that was one of the key benefits that we had because previously, even after we went live with Adaptive, initially it was still on a monthly time strata, but our business is on a daily basis, so I was still having to then break back the monthly budget number into a daily revenue build. And so having that all automated really not only freed up my time, but made it so that what users are building, they can also see how that comes to be and how it plays out throughout the month, and they can make quick decisions to change if we are not meeting that budgeted number.

Marc Moskowitz: Well, thank you so much for answering those questions and certainly Amanda, we're going to want to get your insight as we go through this today. But I'm going to transition this to our other panelists, Kyle Nestler, Kyle's one of our directors at EisnerAmper, and he leads our Workday adaptive planning practice, and he has been helping our clients enhance and transform the way they plan and report and analyze, right Kyle for over a decade. So if you could maybe take this group into the tool and show an example of a hospitality centric dashboard and perhaps it's scenario planning capabilities and actionable insights if you could.

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, absolutely. I'll bring up my screen share right now. So just wait until shares. Awesome. So everything I'm going to show here today ultimately can be integrated as Amanda was saying, from any kind of systems of record, right? Your GL, operational CRMs, hcms, data warehouses, any information that you want to bring in from the tool, you can do that very easily to create that single source of trust for it's here today, just to kind of give you a very high level sense of what we can really do with this tool. And the first one I'm showing here is a financial summary dashboard, which is the highest level that we can get to. So we may have our revenues, cost of sales, operating expenses, ebitda, net income percentages, and then we also have a high level financial scorecard that's showing us month full month information and year to date information compared to actuals and maybe what our plan was with variance across a variety of our GL accounts from the revenue side of things to the individual operating expenses and even trends on how that may be trending month over month from an actual standpoint or potentially comparatively an actual to plan standpoint.

The other great thing that we can do with these dashboards is you can drill in very quickly and easily to get even more granular information as you may need to. By simply, if I want to click on this 91.6 million and I can select revenue type for instance, now it'll actually break it down and I could see what my breakdown of revenue is via my various revenue streams very quickly on how that measures up. And I can see, for instance, food and beverage for that month or period to date made up 11 of my $91 million. And then at any point in time if I want to come back to the original dashboard, I can simply click that back button and it'll take me right there. The next piece I want to show you is what we're calling the financial detail tab, which is just a quick and easy high level summary of P&L data compared to actual the plan where you can see essentially my chart of accounts, I have my month to date, information actuals compared to budget with variance. And a really nice thing you can really do with this tool is you can create little icons that can drive based on the color, maybe whatever parameters you set to understand better quickly and easily identify.

Okay. Okay, let me reshare.

All right. Hopefully it should keep moving here. So the next tab I want to show you is a high level dashboard of just a quick p and l where you can see my plan month to date, my actual year to date with actuals and plan. And the great thing about this and what I was saying earlier is you can actually create little icons that actually create the flags here where I can set specific parameters to quickly color and highlight specific areas that maybe I want to call out that end users need to drill into, come up with a much more detailed or quicker and efficient way to look at pinpoint what they want to see in their cost side of things to come up with that. And then to that point, I could also do various things like I can show various properties if maybe I have multiple locations, multiple restaurants, multiple hotels.

You can group them all together and you could quickly flip through them and see those various pieces of information. I can also see at any point in time I can expand the chart of accounts here. And so if I want to quickly see and continue these flags down where I can see payroll and benefits, maybe that's causing a large variance and I can drill into that information a little bit more. I could get marketing and advertising and quickly just see all these various components that I'm looking at. And so you can also have parameters that can quickly and flip the various months and quickly get to that month without having to do any updates on the reports or continue on to edit anything it very easy for the end users to ultimately navigate and move the tool. And then I'm going to continue on to the next tabs. I'll make sure that this clicks over here. I don't know why it's not.

There we go. Alright, so this is just a quick gaming summary dashboard, which again, all this information is pulled into the tool via the various source systems that they may have. So you can see if I wanted to check what my slot wins were, I could quickly hit on this and I could understand here's all the various denominations they may have around the revenue of my various slot machines. I can get a sense of how I'm planning my workforce or workforce around those various components. I can get month to date, actual trend with variances, slot win by demo graphics and other things, table wins, all that information. But I'm going to move on next to the non-game ring summary. I think really the key that I want to focus on for this webinar, and so you can see this one ultimately is a very similar dashboard to the one I showed first time.

But what we have here is my hotel revenue and I can how much of a hotel revenue I'm getting for a specific period or multiple period to date, my food and beverage revenue, my hotel workforce, again a very easy trend bar graph with budget to actual all of those components here with the trend for comparatively for my budget. And then ultimately, again, just like I had showed on the original or the first dashboard, if I wanted to drill in and get more detail and understand how my food and beverage workforce is made up by simply clicking on job here, I can actually get that broken down by all the different positions that I might have to see how that's made up and ultimately builds up my plan or my actuals for when I pull that data in for reference point.

And then again, just like I said, at any point in time when I want to get back to my original dashboard, I can simply click that back button and it'll take me right back to it. So now we're going to move on to the hotel dashboard and this will give a lot of information, but the first thing you're going to see up at the top is this little bar chart here that's actually showing me buy day information. And so I can bring in my information as Amanda had said earlier by day for actuals where I can get comparative plan to actuals. And what this is actually really showing me is in the blue, that's how many hotel rooms I have available on a daily basis. And the green is actually what I am planning or actuals depending on what I'm trying to show there, what my capacity or how many rooms I actually sold was.

Just so you can get a quick trend and you can look at that in the future forward forecast to understand exactly where you're at on any given day, where you can understand what your capacity is, how many rooms you have available. And that's all driven by the sheet that you're going to see here. Below that is making up that dashboard. And what I'm showing in here is ultimately I can see I have a quick staff for how many rooms I have available on a daily basis, how many rooms I have sold on a daily basis, what my average daily rate is for those rooms to ultimately extrapolate out what the actual revenue would be for those so I can get a quick sense of all that data and ultimately I could add those into these charter graphs to get a sense of that at whatever layer of detail I may actually want to have or understand.

And not just the financial data or the quick statistical data. You can see at the bottom here we have all sorts of metrics that you can track and get a better understanding of. So if I wanted to understand what my weekend revenue or moon sold is versus my weekdays, I can track that information, what my various ratios are, my average daily rates, I can get weekday rooms available, weekend rooms available, and ultimately occupancy percentages. All that information I can have at the quick flick of a fingertip to really get as granular as I need With that information you can see up here, we won't get into too much detail on that, but all that granularity that I may want to track as well, I can do by looking at, for instance here, I would have room type or other information that may be important to my organization and understanding what I'm doing there.

The next piece I'm going to show here is the food and beverage dashboard. And so this one, there's a lot of detail on here, so I just want to talk through kind of the various things that we're actually capturing. So you can see here we have the average, the number of covers per day. We can get an average check per cover. Ultimately we can track or calculate out information by my food sales, liquor sales, beer, wine, whatever, things that I'm ultimately tracking by to see that information here, the comp, and then I can actually get a breakdown of my comp sale percentages so I can see what that percentage is of what my average daily sales might be by food, by liquor, by beer to really get a better understanding of that and plan it, whatever layer of granularity it might look to do. I can have the various meal periods and track it by those pieces of information and ultimately get down to my revenue, what my cost of sales are to get down to a gross profit at a very granular daily piece of information and then track it at whatever other granularities I may want to.

So if I want to see I broke it down by dinner or lunch or breakfast, I can understand all of that information to get a lot more proactive as opposed to reactive with my decision making on how we're doing various things in the organization. Now as we come onto workforce, knowing that that's one of the biggest components and biggest expenses that drive your organization, what you're going to see here is just a quick bar chart that shows me my workforce dollars by month and then ultimately the planning tool that I'm using here that you can see for my salary expenses, my individual people, the positions and all those things. And how this is actually making up what my salary plan is to get very granular and specific with salary expenses by month, payroll taxes by month benefits, whatever I want to ultimately track. And the great thing about this that I can do here is I can quickly spin off alternate scenarios and be able to make adjustments to this on the fly in order to see exactly maybe there's certain things I want to change or I know something very specific might be happening and I want to see how that affects my plan.

So now that I'm on this alternate scenario, you can see there's a little connection to the original plan without actually changing that data on the original plan so I can understand what the impacts of that are going to be before maybe I get to my core plan. For instance here, if I was to say, alright, well my CFO salary is incorrect and I'm going to bump it up to make it a large number just so you can see what the true impact of that is in real time I make that change and I can see, okay, well it escalated up very quickly because I obviously changed that to a much larger figure. And now what you can see here is it also highlighted this in yellow because it's telling me everything I've changed on this from my original plan without actually impacting the original plan.

But at any point in time if I decide these changes, I do want to sink back into the ultimate core final plan. I can do that at the push of a but. And so also I could change his start date where maybe I want to make it later out where I'm going to start him at July 31st and I'm going to hit the button here. And now what you'll see is, again, in real time, it all changes that where you can see everything through July really isn't impacted because he didn't start until the end of the month and August, September, October, et cetera, et cetera are now all drastically increased. But you'll see again everything highlighted in yellow. But when I come back to the original plan, nothing has changed on that plan. And until the point in time when I decide, yeah, these are all the changes I want to make and I think this looks good, I can quickly go to the back end hit press one button and it will automatically sync all those changes directly into that plan and be available for everybody to use.

Or you can ultimately share these alternative scenarios with other users so that they can all create inputs or changes or alternate alternate information that you can see in real time how to impact your budget. Not only can we do salaries by individuals for those types of work, we can also do hourly plans where we can actually break it down And kind of what I've showed earlier when I broke down the food and beverage expenses by individual position, this is where this is made up so I can actually plan by individual day what the amounts I plan to spend on those individual positions are. Maybe I have number of head counts and keep it simpler where I can calculate average rate per head count, do a lot of various things with this, but ultimately get that information at an individual daily amount so that I can plan and compare at the most granular level I need available to me.

And then just with a couple of other items that I'll walk through here today is one is this marketing dashboard. And so this is very detailed here in order to see promotional spend and event expenses that people want to see. So you can see I can look at it via the various offers. I can see start dates and end dates of those promotions with descriptions and I can actually track the revenue I'm generating by those. I can track the expenses that go into it because at the end of the day I can actually get a better sense of how much money or what the ROI actually had on that promotional information truly was so that I can better understand when I run these campaigns what's effective, what's not effective. So as things are planned in the future, you have that detail and that information at your fingertips to be able to plan those better and more accordingly to make them more effective to generate better information into the future.

And the last dashboard here I'm going to show you, this is just kind of an example of a software spend model, prepaid type of model that really just breaks down the various expenses that I have where I can kind of see here's the start dates and end dates with my contracts, what the contract total is, and I can actually calculate out the actual amortization to automate that over time to blend that in with actuals to make it a lot simpler and easier to move and do that. And then even with that component there, which you can see here is there is the renewal tab here where I can actually trigger these amounts to renew and calculate CPI uplifts for these different pieces so that once the original contract and if it's something that I know I renew year over year over year, it can just carry out in the future to calculate out long-term plans that can extrapolate out that information and generate it out into the future. And I can break it down where I can understand what my software versus IT expenses are. All of that information I can set up and easily blend actuals to plan to get a better truer understanding of where my IT spend is really not only coming from but where it's going to. And with that, I will give it back to Mark to close for final thoughts here.

Marc Moskowitz: Yeah, thank you Kyle. I have seen a few q and a questions coming through. So with the few minutes left here, I'm going to sort of summarize a couple themes. Kyle, number one, the general theme is what are the typical phases of an implementation and how long did those phases typically last?

Well, I guess I'll go ahead and answer those questions. That question. A typical implementation is phased in building out what we call the foundation for planning and analytics and in the world with Amanda, right? We had to make sure we understand the property and the different departments and the areas of the organization so that we can move from that more of a spreadsheet centric to more of a decentralized planning model and then integrating the variety of systems that come in, which include their ERP systems or might be their food and aging systems or scheduling systems of that nature. That's usually the first eight weeks of an implementation. And then based upon the type of planning client does the example that Kyle gave for people workforce planning that might bring it up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 weeks for an implementation. Amanda, with the last couple of minutes here and seeing the dashboards that Kyle put together and your experience, any thoughts you want to leave this audience with?

Amanda Epstein: I think the scenario planning is huge. That is something that's only recently I have been able to really utilize. I know it's been around a little bit, but we have not utilized it. However, once our budget is locked and approved, we don't typically like to unlock it. However, there are times where when we plan for something that actuals may be hitting somewhere different, a different account or whatever. And so on the backend I've been asked to kind of move it so it's aligning where it's now being the actuals are hitting. So that's huge just to kind of have that set up to be able to move that without changing anything to the bottom line. None of our numbers are changing, it's just a matter of where it's rolling to. So that's been really helpful. The IT contracts, that is one of our biggest, well our second biggest operating expense and I am constantly asked to review that and see what's actually hitting it versus what was planned for. So having that in there is something that we just started doing within the last couple of years that has been extremely helpful in knowing when to renew things, what we're renewing, and also for our financial team when they're posting those amortized expenses throughout the months and years and stuff to figure out where and how long we're going to amortize those across the period of time. So again, I think that everything that you've mentioned has been very, very important to us over the last years and how we operate. And we've come to rely on it.

Marc Moskowitz: And I'm going to close this out, sort of answering one or the other questions and we'll make sure that we get back to everybody's questions that's here today. But the questions are regarding AI capabilities and two of the things that we're seeing being leveraged in the tool these days is the notion of anomaly detection to be able to do that kind of analysis to identify outliers, but also taking these individualized models and historical data, rich data that's been collected in the system to be able to do predictive forecasting. So within Workday adaptive planning, we have seven plus algorithms that are used to look at both historical actual plan data and forecast forward. We'll be getting contact with all of you and I know Astrid will have a recording as well. So thank you for your time and I'm going to turn this back to Astrid.

^{Transcribed by Rev.com AI}