You’re in the hospitality industry. Whether you work in lodging, food and beverage, event planning, travel, tourism, or theme parks, you know that you need to move a lot of products and services to keep up with demand.
Say you manage a bar …
You can’t go to the local grocery or liquor store every time you need another bottle of Bulliet bourbon. You also need citrus and herbs for garnishes, endless cocktail straws, coasters, and napkins. Not to mention water cups, paper towels, toilet paper, soap, and everything else needed to keep a fully functioning bar in service.
You’re not participating in wholesale, B2C (business-to-customer) purchases, you’re participating in procurement. This is the entire B2B (business-to-business) process of identifying needs, searching for a supplier, managing contracts, paying for and receiving goods and services, keeping records of everything mentioned above, plus maintaining strong relationships with vendors.
There are too many moving parts and too much money to be used inefficiently to perform the procurement process manually. The future is now, and that means using one of many hospitality procurement companies to automate your procurement process.
What Are Hospitality Procurement Companies?
Hospitality procurement companies take the complicated, many-limbed procurement process and automate it using a web interface. This automated process is known as eProcurement. eProcurement is preferable to manual procurement for many reasons.
First, it increases visibility by centralizing access to all your data. It also improves control as you can decide who has access to making orders, who can approve it, and who can make the payment. It also automates things like creation of templates (for invoices, contracts, et.), internal catalogues, and regular purchasing, which shrinks the space for human error. eProcurement also helps with budgeting as expenses and income are centralized and easy to access.
Also, having an electronic audit trail reduces expensive, off-contract rogue spending. This audit trail is also extremely useful come tax season or if you were ever to be audited. Hospitality procurement companies provide you with the services and software to implement the positive improvements that come with switching to eProcurement.
What Is BirchStreet Systems?
BirchStreet Systems is one such hospitality procurement company. Its services can be utilized in many industries, including hotels, casinos and gaming, restaurants and dining, sport and entertainment, and clubs.
It helps those in the hospitality industry to switch to eProcurement by providing software and tools for invoice management, inventory management, recipe management, making payments, sourcing and contracting, and reporting and analytics. With over 16,000 locations contracted in 130 countries, it’s a tried, true, and trusted hospitality procurement company.
Who Trusts BirchStreet Systems?
A surefire way to tell if a company provides excellent service and products is by who their long-term clients are. BirchStreet Systems is trusted by Marriot, Campbell’s, Omni, Hyatt, Four Seasons, Hilton, and Rosewood, among thousands of others, to make their procurement processes cost effective, accurate, and fast.
HHM said of BirchStreet, “We needed to meet brand requirements and wanted to capitalize on our buying programs and rebates. BirchStreet showed us that their Procure-to-Pay system had flexibility, scalability, and more functionality than competing systems.”
If the search for a hospitality procurement company ends with BirchStreet with these successful, worldwide brands, why not your search as well?
Why Do the Biggest Brands Trust BirchStreet?
BirchStreet Systems is a procurement company designed and created specifically for the hospitality industry. If you go to their website you’ll see that they have departments not only in purchasing, IT, and finance, but specific departments for food and beverage operations, hotel management, and culinary operations.
If you navigate to their customers page, you’ll find case studies (including one with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts), data sheets, guides, white paper, and analyst reports.
There are also on-demand webinars available from which you can learn about P2P optimization for the hospitality industry, spend visibility and how HHM leads to success, and how BirchStreet Pay works. Go and see for yourself–BirchStreet is trusted because it gets results.
BirchStreet Has All the Tools for eProcurement
BirchStreet has comprehensive tools that will move your procurement process from manual to digital to increase visibility and control. With BirchStreet you can electronically create and send requests for quotes (RFQs), and track purchases, orders, and receiving in real time.
You can also obtain access to digital supplier catalogues with up-to-date prices and create custom order guides (and instigate automatic ordering when supplies reach a set “low point”). What’s more, you can track purchase transactions and analyze your budget in real time, easily add suppliers with several options of digital onboarding, and access your analytics warehouse.
BirchStreet Offers 3-Way AP Matching
No matter how big or small your hospitality business, one thing you can’t afford is an inaccurate or fraudulent invoice. 3-way matching can help make sure that never happens.
3-way matching is the process of comparing (“matching”) the invoice for the purchase of goods or services with its purchase order (PO) and the receiving information.
Digital records make this matching possible. When BirchStreet’s software automatically matches this information for you, you can rest easy knowing your invoices are accurate and by the books.
BirchStreet Provides State-of-the-Art Invoice Management
Now that you know your invoices are accurate, you’ll need to make sure the rest of the process goes smoothly as well. BirchStreet starts at the beginning of the process, helping you to move from paper invoices to digital. They offer universal scanning hardware support so that you can move your process online.
These documents will then be stored in the cloud, free from physical risks such as fire or flood and hardware risks such as a crashed computer. This shift will save time and improve accuracy. BirchStreet will also give you a single communication mode (in the form of a common email ID) by which to receive all your invoices.
This way, you don’t have to keep track of dozens of envelopes or even several email addresses where invoices are being sent. They also provide an e-invoice tool which will verify invoice details and correct if needed.
With all your invoices digitally arriving in the same place, being checked for accuracy, and being stored digitally in the cloud, you can be sure that your invoice management process is clean and efficient.
BirchStreet’s Top-Notch Inventory Management Tools
Running a hospitality business requires a lot of inventory and that inventory needs to be documented, rotated, and replenished. BirchStreet Systems offers inventory management with AccuBar to save time and increase profitability.
With these tools you can set par values and low values with the option of alert when items reach a certain level. You can then use this information to automatically replenish that item. You can keep track of inventory levels using their patented hand held scanning tools and enhanced point of sale (POS) systems. You will receive regular inventory reports with inventory valuation, profit watch, and simple banquet reports.
Because BirchStreet’s inventory tools offer perpetual inventory in unlimited locations, you can choose to centralize inventory management and have one person or team run the operation from a single location.
Have Complete Control Over Recipes With BirchStreet
BirchStreet has specific tools for the restaurant and food service industries. Its tools can help you control food and beverage costs and consistency throughout all your locations. BirchStreet helps build consistency across kitchens by creating recipes complete with pictures and videos, easy for anyone to follow, and allows you to publish these recipes within your organization.
These tools also list prices for all ingredients in every recipe and help you manage and track inventory based on consumption. If you are to run out of an ingredient, these tools even have “what if analysis” which will model consistent ingredient substitution.
BirchStreet Pay Solves Your Payment Problems
If you’re still writing checks to pay for goods and services, it’s time for an upgrade. Checks are slow, expensive, and more susceptible to fraud than ACH payments. With BirchStreet Pay you can outsource 100% of your payments.
Onboarding is easy and you will be led step-by-step by a concierge-level support team. This support team will be available to you throughout your use of BirchStreet pay. You’ll be able to ditch checks for virtual cards which you can use to make payments through an easy-to-use interface.
Not only is BirchStreet Pay safer, faster, and easier than check-writing, but you’ll immediately be able to begin earning cash back rewards from the moment you start. This amounts to thousands of dollars per property every year.
BirchStreet Systems is a comprehensive eProcurement system that will save you time, money, resources, and headaches. With help from our professionals and software, you can easily convert your files from physical to digital.
Once everything is moved online, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of 3-way AP matching, state-of-the-art invoice management and inventory management, uniform recipe management, and quick, easy, secure online payments that earn you money back.
Join thousands including the world’s top hotel and resort chains in trusting BirchStreet Systems with all your eProcurement needs.