The Accounting Podcast

[00:00:00] Introductions

Blake: Picture this, you start a new job as a financial analyst, six weeks later, the controller retires leaving you in charge. Then one of your accountants gets injured, leaving you with two jobs to figure out that's exactly the situation. Megan Walker found herself in a few years ago, but rather than give up, she stepped up building a process combined with technology that completely changed the role of accounting in her company.

I'm Blake Oliver. And you're listening to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. In this bonus episode, recorded at the Sage Transform conference, David Leary and I chat with Megan Walker about her professional journey, how she went about implementing a new cloud accounting system for 16 hotel locations and how she uses dashboards to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
I hope you enjoy.

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Blake: Welcome to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver-

David: And I'm David Leary.

Blake: We are recording live at the Sage Transform conference in Las Vegas, speaking to a Sage Intacct customer, Megan Walker of Oxford Collection. Megan, welcome to the show.

[00:01:12] Megan's role at Oxford Collection

Blake: Thanks for talking to us. So, what's your role at Oxford collection?

Megan: Yeah. So, I'm the VP of Accounting and Finance at Oxford Collection. Um, We are a chain of hotels, and we are a little bit unique in that we have a corporate headquarters, and we do all of, uh, our accounting out of the corporate headquarters. So, um, we do other services like marketing out of there, IT, revenue management. Even the construction department's out of the headquarters office. Um, I have a team of, five employees, five accountants, and we do all the accounting for all 16 of our hotels.

Blake: So, that's not normal? Normally, the accounting would be done at each location.

Megan: Yeah. So, at bigger location- or a bigger hotel chains, some of the franchisee ones, you actually have a, either a controller or an accountant at each hotel and doing some of that. And so, our general managers, they wear a lot of hats at the property, and so, they do have to do some of the accounting and send it up to us, but we review it all, and do it all there at the headquarters.

Blake: And Did you say how many locations you've got?

Megan: 16. We're in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California.

Blake: and boutique hotels- what does-

Megan: So, we have our flagship property in Bend, Oregon. So, that's where we're headquartered out of. Um, it's the Oxford Hotel. It's a Four Diamond hotel. We just opened a new restaurant, um, within the hotel called Rome. And so, that's our full-service hotel, boutique hotel; like I said, flagship. We have a little bit different of a, of a concept. We are Oxford Suites are the rest of our properties, and we have an evening reception for our guests in the evening, where you get two complimentary beverages, and you know, soups and little crackers, and things like that, and then, we have um, breakfast that comes with it, too. And it's a made-to-order breakfast, as well. we throw in a couple of those amenities for our guests, so it's a, a, you know, a well-rounded experience, and stay there. So-

Blake: I've always wanted to visit Bend, but I've never made it- so far-

Megan: Well, now you need to.

Blake: So, you live in Bend?

Megan: Yeah, it's beautiful. We can have, uh, four different seasons all in one day, though. So, you be, you be prepared. You wake up, and it's freezing, and then, by the afternoon, it's 80 degrees and, you know, you're in shorts and a tank top. So-

David: So, before we jump into, like, how you use Sage Intacct, and the apps you use, and all these things we love to talk about on the show, the PR of Sage sent me a little brief about you, and there's a lot of comments about how your previous software was just Microsoft Excel, and you would have 17-tab spreadsheets with 500 rows and 30 columns for budgeting each property. Tell us about your old world of how you used to do things.

[00:03:39] Back in the Olden Days of 17-Tab Spreadsheets ...

Megan: Yes. So, Yes, I'll give you my uh, quick snapshot of my three-and-a-half years there. So, I started in May of 2019- no, 2018. Excuse me. I started May of 2018, and we- I came on as the, uh, financial reporting analyst, and I was trained by the controller. He had been there 24 years, I believe, and had wanted to retire two years earlier. And so, he trained me, and six weeks after I came on board, he's like, "I'm out, I'm retiring. You got this. Here you go."

Blake: Did you say six weeks?

Megan: Six weeks. Six weeks. So, a couple months later, one of my accountants got a head injury, and so, she was out. At that point, I was doing my job I was hired for, the controller's job, and then this- another accountant's job. And so, within that though, I mean, I worked a lot of crazy hours, I know. You know us accountants, that's what we do, but I learned a lot about every role, and how each role does their job at the company in the accounting department.

And so, it was a blessing in disguise because I could see each role, and how I could improve it. So, I had an idea at that point, as I'm doing these three jobs- I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to change it. To me, it feels like it's been a long road, but we've done so much in the last three-and-a-half years. Like, I have to continue to remind myself- and that's why I like talking about it, as well, so we can see where we've come from- where we were, and where we are now; so, we can see how much progress we've made in the last three-and-a-half years.

So, anyway, long story short there. Um, So, we had Adagio, which is a Softrak product, and it was housed on a server at our office. I live about 20 minutes away from the office, and I couldn't do anything outside of a mile radius of the office because I had- it was housed there on the server. Anytime I had to work, I had to go in; I couldn't do it from wherever I was at. So, that was strike one.

There were many other strikes in there, but back to your original question, um, the Excel spreadsheet. We, we referred to them as expense budget trackers, and anytime anybody said, "I have a question about an expense budget tracker," it was just very heavy because you knew they found a mistake, and when they found a mistake, it was a mistake that was probably duplicated in all 16 of these spreadsheets.

David: And just to interrupt for a second, those of you who obviously cannot see Megan describing this, you could see the pain, and the anguish on her face when she started to mention the title of this.

Megan: Yes, absolutely. So, when someone said, "Hey, I have a question about the expense budget tracker," you would just say, "All right ..." Like, "I need to prepare for this, so give me a half hour, and I'll get back to you." And then, "Okay. Lay it on me. What is it?" And so, you know, we'd have to go into these spreadsheets, and if you found anything, you had to go in and fix them, all 16, but finding where the problem was, too- I mean, that was- most of the issue is trying to figure out where the issue was.

So, these spreadsheets, um, we used them every single month, as well, And so there was a lot of manual input into those spreadsheets by general managers, by accounting staff. And so, we didn't have a clear Actual v. Budget outside of that spreadsheet, that was our Actual v. Budget. So, literally, when a general manager went down the street and spent a hundred dollars at Home Depot, Lowe's, whatever, he'd come back, and he'd open up his Excel spreadsheet and type a hundred dollars in there. And then, when his housekeeping manager ordered laundry detergent, he'd type in, "We spent $75 on laundry detergent," you know? And so, that was our budget versus our actual picture.

Blake: Relying on people that actually do that.

Megan: Relying on people to input that into a spreadsheet, and some properties said, "I'm not doing that." So, some properties had no idea until, once a month, on the 20th after- so, say, you know, we're closing the books for October. They wouldn't get their P&L until the 20th of November. Then they would say, "Oh, how did I do on my budget? Oh, I blew it out of the water." Yeah. No joke. Like, "How did that happen?" Because they didn't, track it. So, When I came on board, I said, "Mark my words, I will only do these spreadsheets for one, maybe two years." And I- after the two years, they were gone.

David: So, was it instinctive that you were like, hey, there's gotta be a better way to do this, or did you come from a previous role in a different job, where you're like, oh, this thing called cloud accounting exists, or something like that?

Megan: No, so I- my background was not in hospitality. So, the owners of the company took a chance on me with no hospitality background. Uh, So, I was in real estate. We were commercial developers. I filled a couple of different roles, but I got my CPA license in Idaho, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to be in public accounting. I wanted to be in private, uh, because I didn't want to do tax returns, or audits, or things like that.

I stayed in the private industry, but I had never done anything like this before, ever. I've never implemented a new software, none of that. I just knew there had to be better ways of doing that, and I knew that, by having to do those three jobs, I wouldn't want to hire anybody to do those jobs. I don't want to do those jobs, so, how can I hire somebody to do that? Like I said, I set out to find a better way to do that, and, you know, that's where Sage Intacct came into play.

[00:08:43] Finding a Better Way

Blake: Did you have to make a case for Sage Intacct with the owners of the business, or were they like fine with you doing whatever you wanted to do?

Megan: Well, so, when I came on board, the gentlemen I took over for- like I said, he'd been there 24 years. Didn't want to bring on a new accounting software. He was very comfortable in his- he did almost everything. So, he, as the controller, did a majority of everything, and I knew I didn't want to do all those jobs. I wanted to be able to delegate out different pieces of it so I could stay high level. Whereas he was more- he wanted to do it all himself, so he knew it was done; not rely on anybody else. And so, just different mentality there.

And so, when I came on board, they said my very first job is I need to find a new accounting software. They had known they've needed one before I came on board; they just needed the person to fill that role to do it because- we hold a general managers' conference every year. So, we get all 16 of our general managers together, our regional managers, our executives together. For the last five years, their main request, their main ask was, "We want a new accounting software; we want a new accounting software," because none of them had insights into accounting software.

So, our old one, they didn't even know what it was because they didn't go in it. So, now, I've built dashboards for them all in Sage Intacct, and they all have logins, and they can go in there, and that's part of- most of them that's part of their morning routine. You know, they pull up their email, they pull up their dashboards, see how everything went from the day before, and that's part of their routine.

Blake: So, you come in here-

Megan: Yes!

Blake: New industry. Never having done an ERP software implementation before, your first job is to learn the business. You get six weeks to do that. And then your next mission is implement new software. How did you, having not done this before, even know where to start? What did you look at? I'm curious to know. You must- I mean, 'cause there are so many options out there.

Megan: Well, I always like a good challenge, and so, I saw this as a challenge, and I just started asking around. I just googled, you know, what was out there for the hospitality industry, and I kind of narrowed it down. We had a competitor that we looked at- am I allowed to ...?

So, we looked at M3, which is hospitality based. So, they've got all the occupancy, ADRs, rev pars, you know, all the terms that we use, all the matrix we use; they have it all built in out of the box. We actually went as far as bringing in the sales rep; we brought in a couple of our GMs to sit in on a demo, and everyone was sold. "Yep. This is software for us," but it really felt like what we had already, and we were just switching over.

Blake: Was it cloud-based? Was it on-prem, or-

Megan: I think it was cloud-based. I think that was the only difference between kind of what we had now, and then that, but everything- the look, and the feel was the same. I really felt like, I gotta look at something else. We had made the decision on M3, that that's what we were going to go with, but- to me, and so I had the owners' buy in, everything. Like, it just made sense. It's hospitality, but I felt like- Here's what we have, and you have to fit into the box. And If you want to do anything outside of that, I'm sorry, we can't help you. We have this box that you have to fit into ..."

And I really didn't like that, and so, I started looking elsewhere, and that's where Sage Intacct came up. Then, I had to convince everyone who had all made the decision on M3- I had to reconvince them: "No, this is for us. This is the product for us." I didn't have to do too much convincing, honestly, because the owners trusted me, and my decisions, and, in the year I'd been there. So, we signed the contract in July of 2019; so, shortly after a year I'd been there. I'd gained some trust with them, and they said, you know, "Whatever you think is going to work best for us, we will support you." And so, away I went.

[00:12:17] Unrealistic Implementation Expectations

David: All right, so you signed the contract. How long did it take you to- not knowing- like when you've actually done implementing, like, is it ever done? But to where you were able to pull the plug on the desktop server in your back room, and go forward-

Megan: Yeah. So, signed the contract July of 2020; project kicked off- excuse me, 2019; project kicked off September 2019. And I had unrealistic expectations, never having done this before. And so, at that point- you had asked me, you know, how do you even start? And so, at that point, I started talking with colleagues, and networking and saying- who've been through it before. So, I actually had a really good friend, her mom did this. like she was a consultant, for accounting firms. She was actually a lawyer, but she'd go in, and she'd revamp their accounting systems for them; implement new ones. And so, I had her as a-

David: That sounds very scary!

Megan: I know, right? Very scary. So, I had heard of the resource, so I- where do I go? What do I do? How do I, you know, how do I know this is successful? Because my biggest fear was, we're gonna get to the end of it. It doesn't work. We've made the wrong decision. I had unrealistic expectations. We wanted to go live November 1st; then it was December 1st; and then it was January 1st. And then, we finally went live February 1st. But I think I had mentioned this before that we built a custom integration between RoomKey, our property management system, and Sage Intacct. So that is not out of the box. They're not a marketplace partner. So, that custom integration is what took a lot of the time and Armanino built that for us.

[00:13:41] Creating Insights with Sage

Blake: So, that's really interesting. Was that one of the reasons you chose Intacct is that you could build this? You knew ahead of time, you wanted to do it?

Megan: Yes. So, our revenue lives in RoomKey. I mean, that's our- we check people in, we check people out. We make notes in there. We post payments. That's our cash register for our hotels. On a monthly basis, we used to take all that data, download it, put it into a spreadsheet, manipulate the data, and how we need it, and then upload it into our accounting software. So, that would take my accountant - I mean, on a really good day - six hours; on a bad day, when she finds problems, eight hours.

I knew I no longer wanted to do that, but I wanted my data to be there every single night. We built that custom integration. It's a daily feed that comes over. So, every day when I log in, I can see the revenue from yesterday. If we got to the end of a month, we got to October 31st, before, we had no idea how much revenue we had for that month inside of the accounting software. Now, it tracks all along the way.

Blake: Oh, that's great, and you mentioned you have dashboards for each property, so the manager can log in-

Megan: The manager can log in, yep.

Blake: -see where they are, budget versus actuals. How often are you able to update the expense side of things then? You've got the revenue every day. What about expenses?

Megan: The expenses, we cut checks through Sage Intacct. So, the A/P, as we're cutting checks, it gets updated, actual, as it goes. We also have SIVP, like I mentioned, as well, so we do forecasting, as well. Sage Intacct Planning. So, SIP-

Blake: Used to be Budgeting and Planning; not-

Megan: Yes. That's a planning tool, and a budgeting tool. And so, we use that to do our annual budgets, and we use it to do our monthly forecasts, as well. And so, we forecast both revenues, and expenses on a monthly basis. That rolls into the actual or- well, not the actual picture, but we have, uh, a budget versus a forecast versus an actual view on their dashboard, so that it can see all three of them side by side.

Blake: It sounds like you've kind of built the dream of what an accounting system should be. Congratulations.

Megan: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. There's still a lot of things we want to do. I mean, you know, this, having the foundation feels really nice that it's there, so that we can build upon it, but, I mean, there's all sorts of things we want to do. And I've got a I've got a giant whiteboard in my office, and it has all my, you know, to-do list things, or my goals that I want to accomplish. I very rarely get to you know, mark one off, but every now and then, I get to, but, I mean, I've got a five-year roadmap on that whiteboard.

Blake: What are the big ones that you're still looking for?

Megan: We have ADP; we use them as our time, and attendance. Labor is our biggest cost, being in the hospitality industry, so, we have found a way, ourselves, to get our labor dollars, and our labor hours in on a daily basis, as well. And then, I built a labor widget on their dashboard, so that they can get their productivity, their minutes per occupied room, different matrices within the hospitality industry, but there's so much more we want to do with that because it's a good starting point, but we have to incorporate different things into there.

I'm really excited to hear, you know, what's going to happen with ADP because I think we'll be able to provide them with some information, as well. "Here's what we're doing. Here's how we're using it," because we're doing it manually right now. We built a report in ADP; um, our HR specialist did, and then she downloads the data, and then pushes it in at 10:00 AM every day. Well, I want to automate that with an API and be able to build upon that, as well.

Blake: So, you've got the revenue daily; you've got the expenses daily; you've got the time, and attendance daily; all of it's like a continuous reconciliation of all that-

Megan: We've never had one system house all that data together. It's always been your revenue data is over here, your expense data's here, and your labor data is here. But being able to pull that all together, that was the overall goal, so that general managers can see everything in one place and not have to do everything manual calculations by bringing it together themselves; it's there for them.

[00:17:39] What's Still Missing?

David: Is there any piece of data that you're not currently getting sucked in right now?

Megan: Yeah. We're working on our credit cards. So, we have company credit cards and the reconciliation process for that's very manual. And so, that piece of it- that's our next project. We want to double our credit cards that we currently have. We looked at American Express for a while, but US Bank actually has a platform where they push all the transactions into Sage Intacct and all the coding happens in there. So, right now-

Blake: In the bank site, or in Intacct?

Megan: In the bank site. So, US Bank has a portal where you can upload your dimensions - your GL accounts, your locations, your departments, your classes - all of that in there, and then each individual cardholder is coding all of their own invoices, and when it syncs over, it comes over coded automatically. So, we're working on that. And then, we're working on, like, electronic signatures for our checks, and different things like that, so that the check prints out with a signature on it. We still have some work to do.

David: Going back to the hotels themselves, besides just renting a room, are there other services that the hotels provide, other departments, or divisions of the ...?

Megan: I mean, we've got smaller things. Obviously, hotels are our main source of revenue, but we do have some bistros. We do have some add-ons, and some enhancements that you can add. We just hired a new VP of revenue management earlier this spring, and he's got a lot of ideas. He does have a hospitality background, 20 some years of it. So, he starting to add on a lot more things, and we're starting to really think about, where is our industry headed in the future, and how can we capitalize on some of those other items, but, obviously, our bread and butter is, for sure, the hotels.

[00:19:14] Megan's Seat at the Table

David: Then, do you get a seat at the table in these discussions, so you can bring the accountant's point of-

Megan: Yep, I do. And, and, and I always ask, how are you going to want to see that data? Because, you know, if you're going to want to see it on a weekly, monthly basis, I need to make sure I have it in my system, the way I can spit out a report by that. So, typically, where that is, is do we need to set up a new GL account for it? If you're going to ask to see it, you know, or track it against something, we'll set up a new GL account, but if not, we'll use an existing one.

We had about 9,000 GL accounts in our old system, and we had- there were six different chart of accounts, and each entity had its own chart of accounts. and so, I took that, and I consolidated that about to like 395 now. And so, I want to manage that. I want to make sure that you know, it doesn't get out of control again because it can quickly. So anyway, yeah. I just ask, how are you going to want to see the data? Because I don't want to have you know, me or my team have to do extractions manually. I want to be able just to build a report and it spits out what you need

[00:20:12] Oxford Collection's Metric(s) System

Blake: So, we talked about the dashboards that you've built for the managers, and their ability to track Budget v. Actual on a daily basis throughout the month; super important. The owners of the business, you know, the folks at the executive level, what are the metrics that they care about, that you care about, in hospitality that are sort of unique to that business - for those of us who aren't in it?

Megan: you know, I don't know if I have specific examples for you because it varies. You just never know what they're going to want to see, but I'm okay with that. And I, I, you know, I like that everything's- every day is different and- you know, they'll walk in, and, and, and they'll ask me for something that I wouldn't even ever have thought about, but I can build a report in 15 minutes and have it to them.

So, giving you an example, they had a meeting with some bankers a couple months back, and they needed to see the history, for, you know, three years broken down by a certain region, or just the properties that that bank had. Out of the 16 locations, that bank had three locations, so I was able to go in and build a report, and just pick up those three locations. They needed all that data, so he- I think he emailed me at like 7:30 in the morning, and their meeting was at 8:15, or something. And I was like, oh boy. So, I jumped on, got it done, and had it to him by 7:55, or something.

David: Which is the power of having this stuff in one system.

Blake: One system for- locations-

Megan: Yeah, whereas before, I continually had to tell him, "I can get that for you, but maybe in three or four weeks," because the report building in the last system I was in, it was a very bad version of Excel. I mean, it reminded me a lot of Excel, but you couldn't do a lot of the features, and it was, very manual. So, any change you had to make, it took literally days of work.

Blake: So, Excel without the benefit of flexibility.

Megan: Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it's just, it's nice to be able to be adapt- adaptive. If they walk into my office and they want something- generally, you know, any of the leadership team can walk in my office and ask me a question, and I can answer it before they even have to leave because I can pull it up right in front of me and answer their questions. And so, I've also built a leadership dashboard that our executive team has access to, as well. They can go in, and any of the things they want to see on a continual basis, they're built out there, and they can go in, and they can see them at any point in time, too.

Blake: So, Megan Walker of Oxford collection, thank you so much for joining us!

Megan: Yeah!

[00:22:40] Get in Touch with Megan

Blake: If anyone wants to connect with you online, where can they do that?

Megan: Yeah. Well, I have a LinkedIn, so you can find me uh, via my LinkedIn. yep. You can put that in the show notes, Yeah. And then, email's usually the best way to get ahold of me as well.

Blake: Megan is the VP of Accounting and Finance at Oxford Collection. So, the next time you are thinking about taking, a vacation, and you might want to try something different than the usual mega hotel, try an Oxford Collection Hotel.

Megan: Absolutely! Look us up- Oxford Suites.

Blake: Thank you-

Megan: Thanks, guys.