The case study focuses on automating monthly payment and financial reports for a hospitality business that uses Apaleo as a property management system and needs to translate and transfer data into its accounting system, automatically.
About the client
The client runs a small hotel chain in Belgium. They juggle a substantial amount of invoicing and payment reporting every month. They are open to automation and therefore seek to optimize as many processes as they can, in order to minimize manual labor and maximize efficiency.
The challenge
The customer was required to upload financial reports for all the hotels, along with payment reports, into the accounting systems (Exact Online and AFAS) weekly - this was later adjusted to monthly. This manual process was time-consuming as they had to extract essential reports from Apaleo, and then aggregate and organize the data in Excel. Apart from the significant time invested, they occasionally faced challenges ensuring the CSV files were compatible with the accounting system. Also, because the processes were handled weekly, they were pressured to complete them on a specific day each week.
The Solution
We chose Make.com to streamline the process as follows 👉 At the start of each week (later adjusted to the 1st day of every month), we extract data from Apaleo 👉 We format the data appropriately for each accounting system 👉 We provide the accountant with reports in CSV format 👉 The reports are uploaded without any further modifications.
In other words, we fully automated the reporting process, ensuring that the accounts receive a timely email with the correctly formatted CSV each month. Furthermore, we developed an interface on Airtable, allowing users to select the desired hotel and type of report. This gives them the ability to easily customize their reports without having to access Make.com.
Results
After this solution was implemented, the client was ready to reap the benefits:
Conclusion
Leveraging the advantages of no-code (such as rapid development, agility, and adaptability) and combining the robust API integration of Apaleo with the automation capabilities of Make.com, we can swiftly produce any report a hotel may require, be it financial, statistical, reservation-related, and more.
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