In Accounting, Consolidating Vendors Makes Sense

With properties located throughout North Carolina, Summit Hospitality Group, an integrated hotel management and consulting firm based in Raleigh, currently operates 17 hotels and two restaurants. Founded in 1989, the company specializes in development and operations as well as sales, marketing and revenue management across its portfolio of restaurants, limited-service and select-service hotels.

For years, Summit Hospitality relied on multiple vendors to manage their financial and accounting data. It didn’t take long for the company to grow tired of their inefficient business intelligence solution, and their business analytics team began searching for an alternate provider(s) that could improve proficiencies around reporting and property management by consolidating and standardizing their financial data in a concise, consistent, and reliable manner.

“We first decided we needed a change when it came to our business intelligence reporting, which simply wasn’t efficient,” said Glenn Young, a business analyst at Summit Hospitality. “Our reporting tool, our accounting system and our time management system weren’t getting the job done for us with each being a standalone platform and integrating data among them proved challenging.”

Having been familiar with M3’s reputation as a leading accounting software provider in the hospitality industry, Summit Hospitality decided to make the switch in 2018.

“We were very familiar with M3 as they are a dominant player in the hospitality accounting software world,” Young said. “The deciding factors were M3’s ability to integrate all of our data onto the same platform, and their commitment to reinvesting in technology and improving their products to suit customers’ needs.”

Built by hoteliers for hoteliers, M3’s industry-specific solutions provide robust accounting and financial services to more than half of the top hotel companies in the U.S. Summit currently utilizes all of M3’s solutions, including Accounting Core, M3’s entry-level solution, Time Management, a day-to-day labor management and monitoring tool, and Insight, M3’s business intelligence platform.

Summit also uses M3’s PMS integration technology, which provides a suite of solutions for financial needs, giving hotel owners, management teams and general managers an accurate snapshot of financial performance across multiple properties.

With M3’s PMS mapping, Summit Hospitality can now access a centralized data warehouse, which automatically combines the financial, forecasting and statistical data from each property onto one platform.

“With our old structure, if we wanted to report out on a single property, it was a trade-off between data integrity and scale of reporting – we basically had to pick our poison,” Young said. “With M3, that kind of trade-off doesn't exist. We can report out on one or multiple properties, and our data integrity is not sacrificed in the slightest.”

Thanks to M3, Summit Hospitality increased its overall efficiency and streamlined its financial reporting, enabling them to save time, reduce costs and make more informed business decisions using accurate, timely data. By partnering with top industry providers, M3 can further optimize their customers’ user experience, helping them save time and money in the process.