Proactively Manage Your Bottom Line

We have seen and heard how 2015 has completed a record year in occupancy, RevPAR and profit levels.  2016 is following this growing trend. This increase, however, created an increase in labor costs for hotels and resorts. The major increase in labor costs were the highest in the Rooms Department and Sales & Marketing. The Rooms Department normally consists of the front desk, bell staff and laundry – all of whom have hours influenced by occupancy. The maintenance Department will most likely begin to see an increase in labor costs as the increase in occupancy trends continue.

Changes and increases like these greatly affect the bottom line both positively and negatively, depending on which area you analyze.  Occupancy growth and higher RevPAR are two phrases we love to hear but payroll increases, not so much. What is the answer to keep these two in balance so that RevPAR and Profit Levels continue to stay on top? Since labor is a high percentage of our budgets, Hotel/Resort Management must have a way to see in real time how payroll is maintaining based on the occupancy. The answer is in the ability to drill down into the data to the minute levels and see how labor can be better utilized.

Datavision’s dynamic platform has evolved to meet the Users’ business needs with Payroll Control. Detailed Payroll Data is combined with PMS, POS, Spa, Golf, Budget & Forecast data to generate comprehensive payroll reports showing regular vs overtime pay, cost percentage of revenue, and productivity information such as cost per occupied room and cost per cover. Datavision can also extract data from the Timeclock system (ADP, Kronos, etc.) Hours and Wages are extracted by pay code, by department and position by date. In order to catch up on punch edits to prior days, Datavision will extract data for the entire pay period from the time clock every day. 

Once this data is part of the warehouse, you can mix and match labor information with operational information such as rooms, revenues and covers to build detailed labor metrics reports. You can quickly identify potential problem areas concerning your productivity such as departments/positions running at an unexpectedly high cost per occupied room or cost % revenue. You can build your own metrics such as labor hours per service for the spa or revenue as a percent of labor dollars for the bar. Datavision can also build payroll projections given a department or property’s productivity metrics to help predict the final month end payroll costs.  Watching the projected month end vs budget month end vs forecast month end will allow the department heads to proactively manage their bottom line. 

January is already into the third week so if you are looking at Business Intelligence for 2016, now is the time. For more information www.datavisiontech.com or call 954-433-3633.