There are several schools of thought when it comes to efficiency. Here's one rather amusing take from the science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, "Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."

A second take is attributed to a variety of people but goes something like this, "If you want something done, ask a busy person."

Perhaps there's a bit of truth in both statements - if things are easier, we spend less time doing them, and if we are busy, we get more done in a day because we can't afford to waste time.

Hotels are getting busier all the time with guests returning.

That's great for revenues, but it's only part of the equation. Hotels also need to operate efficiently if they are to convert this into bottom line profit.

The more complex a business, the greater the number of moving parts, the more efficiency becomes important. It's especially important for large multi-national, multi-chain hotels.

Taking the pain out of back-office payments

Hotels can achieve valuable efficiency savings by simplifying their payments back-office.

Reconciliations and reporting are often time consuming tasks for many hotels. Phoning an acquirer for reversal authorisations can be slow and laborious. Stand-alone processes across different sites adds to the headache.

You can dramatically improve efficiency through an online payments portal.

Hotel staff benefit from a single view of all payments across card present and card not present transactions in real-time across all sites. Hoteliers can manage their operations and reconciliation more efficiently, saving time and costs.

You can better manage transactions and reconciliations with online reporting tools and access them via any device, which offers instant access to real-time transaction data. Staff can also perform refunds and authorisation reversals, including for pre-authorisations.

A central view of all transactions

One of the major benefits of an online portal for multi-national hotels is being able to centralise accounting. Hotels can access transaction data in one central place and view all stores or properties in every country.

Individual hotels have a clearer view of what's going on financially, while group management has a constantly updated overview of everything. They can look at an individual establishment, city or country and compare and contrast performance.

Hoteliers benefit from lower processing costs and improved understanding of their business. Management teams can access the facts and figures they need through a simple to access web portal and control the level of staff access.

There's no limit on the number of users you can permit to login to the portal.

Simple reconciliations

An online payments portal simplifies reconciliations too.

You can balance transactions with your Point of Sales (POS) systems, Property Management System (PMS), and across acquirers and business bank accounts. Multi-nationals and integrators can use an API to pull transaction data into their internal data warehouse.

Downloading reconciliation reports is easy – in fact you can download a whole host of reports and export them for wider distribution.

Historical data is also available for three years so it's really simple to compare performance over time.

Making life easier for staff

Staff benefit from automating back-office payments processes as it frees them up to talk to guests about all the wonderful extra services you provide, which can boost profits.

Front desk staff get to spend less time on admin and have fewer manual processes to complete, thanks to automation and reconciliation of transactions.

It just makes everything quicker and easier, saving time and reducing costs.

It's another way you can get more Dinngggg from your payments.