Simplify hotel & resort management with smart ERP

Front office software is judged on how fast a guest gets a room key. Back office software is judged on whether the property makes money at the end of the month. Hotels that try to make one system do both usually end up doing the second job in Excel.

The split below is roughly how it lands in a working property. Al Mandaloun Group, which runs multiple hospitality outlets, is among the businesses using Wizard on this side of the operation.

A hotel with a lobby bar, a pool bar, a restaurant and banqueting is running four small businesses that all buy similar things. Left alone, each one develops its own supplier relationships, and the group loses the only real advantage it has, which is the size of its combined order.

The requisition model also fixes something the finance team complains about every month. When an outlet takes stock from the central store, that is a transfer at cost, not a purchase. If it is recorded as a purchase, group food cost is overstated and nobody can explain why.

Menu engineering in most properties is done once, at launch, and then left. Two years later the same dish is on the menu at the same price with an ingredient that has doubled. The kitchen knows. Nobody else does, because the information lives in a delivery note.

Sub-recipes matter here more than people expect. A sauce made in the central kitchen and used across four dishes has its own cost, and when that cost moves it should move in all four. Costing each dish from raw ingredients only, and re-doing it by hand, is why most recipe costing exercises are abandoned.

This is the number that separates a hotel food and beverage operation that is under control from one that is not. A group variance is useless because it averages a disciplined kitchen with a bar that is pouring heavy. Per outlet, per period, it points at something specific.

Getting it requires two things that are unglamorous: a count that happens on a schedule, and sales data at item level. The count is a management decision. The sales data comes from your POS, and how clean it is determines how much this analysis is worth. That is the honest constraint here.

Seasonal hospitality has a payroll shape nothing else has. A resort can go from forty staff to a hundred and forty in six weeks, then back again. Every one of those people needs a contract, attendance tracking, an end-of-service calculation and a final settlement, and the finance team doing it by hand loses most of the season to it.

Service charge distribution is the other piece that eats time in this industry. Running it through the same payroll that produces the salary slips means the calculation is documented rather than being a spreadsheet one person understands.

Occupancy and average rate come from the PMS. Wizard supplies the other half, which is what it cost to deliver the occupancy you had. Most properties can quote their occupancy figure instantly and cannot say what a room cost to service last month.

For groups with more than one property, the same structure rolls up. Each hotel reports on its own and consolidates, which makes a weak property visible instead of hidden inside a group total.