“We’re seeing massive savings due to the automation we’ve accomplished with Sage Intacct.” – Jeff Banaszak, CFO, Creative Dining Services
Creativity, collaboration, innovation, flexibility and quality — those are some of the characteristics by which Creative Dining Services defines itself. Founded in 1990 by two colleges dissatisfied with the caliber of university food service contractors, Creative Dining has grown exponentially over nearly 30 years. Today, the Michigan-based food service and hospitality provider employs 1,800 individuals and serves over 70 client locations across 12 states, including higher education institutions, senior living facilities, corporations, conference venues and more. Yet until 2017, Creative Dining’s accounting practices didn’t match the high caliber of its customer-centric food service offerings. Prone to frequent crashes, QuickBooks was poorly suited to scale with the company’s rapid growth. Creative Dining staff at numerous locations spent hundreds of hours each week manually entering data into Google Sheets to produce P&L reports, which would then need to be reconciled against financial data in QuickBooks managed by corporate accounting. Frustration among finance personnel was high. Plus, the company found it increasingly difficult to hire programmers with the specialized skills needed to maintain a homegrown accounts payable system.
The company had grown too big for QuickBooks. Creative Dining planned to continue growing rapidly and knew it needed a new accounting system – it began to look at NetSuite and other accounting and hospitality business financial management solutions, before selecting its choice: Sage Intacct.
Why Sage Intacct?
- Site-specific Sage Intacct dashboards give on-site food service directors an array of vital information and key metrics, including invoices due. Those timely invoicing insights prompted a 12% improvement in accounts receivable collections, increasing yearly cash fow by $760,000. Dashboards are also set up for regional directors and two operational VPs, providing real-time visibility into key metrics such sales, income, expenses and more – eliminating weeks of waiting to review monthly performance figures and enables faster, more informed decision-making.
- With a focus on managing Creative Dining’s new and expanding locations, accounting and finance team required collaborative, real-time financial processes. Creative Dining, with about $100 million in annual revenue, is reaping massive time savings of an estimated 18,875 hours a year since it implemented Sage Intacct, saying goodbye to manual data entry into Google Sheets by finance team members at its 70 client locations, giving the company more time to focus on front-of-house customer service and culinary support. In addition, corporate accounting is saving 10 hours a week by no longer manually reconciling data from Google Sheets. Overall, roughly $20,000 a year is saved with automated invoice approval workflows through Sage Intacct, avoiding the need for a third-party application.
Whether you operate multi-property hotels, restaurant chains, entertainment venues, resorts, clubs, or other hospitality businesses, you need a sophisticated hotel management system to keep your accounting and finances on track. With Sage Intacct hospitality software, your staff can enter and view information for specific properties and locations, without seeing the financials for other sites and businesses. Sage Intacct even helps you keep up with evolving revenue recognition requirements to ensure compliance without compromising efficiency. Improve cash flow and revenue forecasting with real-time visibility into current inflows, outflows, and revenue streams. Sage Intacct hospitality software shows you the entire picture. Whether it’s for hotel accounting, restaurant accounting, or POS accounting. Creative Dining Services discovered Sage Intacct’s cloud-based software provides secure, web-based access to real-time information – on any browser, any device, allowing Creative Dining to operate more efficiently.
