CASE STUDY: How A&R Hospitality Management Improved Operations, Cut Costs and Saved Time

Headquartered in Gulf Shores, Ala., A&R Hospitality Management owns and manages 21 hotel properties throughout Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. As the dedicated hotel management division of umbrella company, A&R Group, A&R Hospitality Management was founded in 2014 to provide a wide variety of hospitality services from operations and revenue generation to accounting, human resources, engineering and food & beverage. To support and manage its portfolio effectively, A&R Hospitality requires the most advanced financial, labor and data management software available.

The Challenge

When A&R’s hospitality portfolio began to rapidly expand, the company’s senior leadership quickly realized its accounting provider, QuickBooks, couldn’t keep up with its growth. This resulted in inefficiencies in financial reporting and data analysis for A&R’s expanding business.

“As our company continued to grow, we needed easily editable reports and a versatile platform that was compatible with hotel-brand PMS systems,” said Angela Patel, CEO of A&R Hospitality Management. “Overall system functionality and ease-of-use were also top priorities so that our staff could easily transition and begin using the software right away.”

As a result, A&R’s team began looking for a more powerful suite of tools to accurately execute A&R’s financial and labor reporting, as well as streamline its onboarding process for new hotels.

The Solution

Having a firm grip on the functionality that A&R required, the company sought out M3’s forward-thinking software and made the switch to M3 from QuickBooks in February 2015.

“We were impressed with M3’s ability to manage so many different types of data within one platform,” said Patel. “With M3, we can extract historical data from QuickBooks and import it directly into Accounting Core, giving us comparative P&Ls right out of the gate with few inaccuracies.”

As A&R continued to grow their company, they recognized that M3’s training and implementation teams’ high-level of support and engagement were instrumental in A&R’s successful transition to the platform, having provided an unmatched level of hotel industry experience during the process.

A&R Hospitality Management currently utilizes M3’s entry-point solution, Accounting Core, M3’s business intelligence software, Insight, and Labor Management, M3’s streamlined labor management tool.

The Results

Since transitioning to M3 more than six years ago, A&R Hospitality has seen numerous improvements to its operations, saving valuable time and cutting costs across the board.

Accounting Core offers A&R accurate, timely and industry-preferred financial statements, allowing managers to access data in real time and perform monthly analyses without needing to coordinate with accounting departments. A&R’s team can also compare period-to-date reporting with forecasts to allow its hotels to adjust spending habits based on revenue expectations.

“M3’s offers the most comprehensive suite of hotel-specific solutions, which in turn allows our hotel teams to quickly identify performance trends and make changes in real time,” said Wesley Ludloff, Chief Operating Officer of A&R Hospitality Management. “Having powerful back-office tools and strong data integrity allows A&R to manage large sets of data at the speed at which our business is done and helps us make changes right away to improve performance.”

From the property level to corporate management, Insight offers A&R a comprehensive and accurate analysis of key property performance data and data sets, such as ADR, OCC and RevPAR, ensuring better decision-making using a data-driven approach in real time. And with Labor Management’s metric reporting and scheduling features, managing schedules, reviewing overtime and analyzing employee productivity has never been easier for A&R.

Designed by hospitality industry professionals, M3’s suite of industry-specific solutions provides customers like A&R Hospitality Management with superior accounting, labor and data management solutions. With real-time, cloud-delivered data reporting, streamlined accounting and proactive labor management, M3 drives operational efficiencies and boosts performance for hospitality businesses across the board.