![]() ![]() ![]() In the CFO’s world, consolidation is the process of combining financial data from several business entities and rolling it up to your one parent company. Step forward, corporate performance managementĪ more optimized way would also make the consolidation process a lot easier, which as noted above had historically been outsourced to third parties. I wanted one platform to be able to do all this consistently and transparently. We’re a long way from the all-inclusive breakfast buffet we have a very wide range of bars and restaurants and concepts within our resorts that we need to constantly make better and fit with what people want today. So, the key is to try and run the business on a day-to-day basis in terms of fully accurate cost analysis - to not only just control our costs but to also improve the Sandals and Beaches product constantly. People book and so pre-pay their holidays one or two years in advance with us. Why would a leisure company need to have such sophisticated back office processes? These and other kludges meant, Lawler says, that a point was reached where having one way to co-ordinate all the financial statements with management accounts “all the way up and down” the organization was identified as a necessity. We really needed to get everything in one location and a single place of truth. Reconciliations and everything else were happening on different laptops and desktops and shared folders and not-shared folders. That meant that forecasting and budgeting was done completely externally in spreadsheets and uploaded back into Oracle, and not off one, reliably up-to-date, database. Lawler says he’s worked with a wide range of accounting packages over the years, but the Sandals situation when he arrived five years back was far from optimal.Īpart from the core Oracle software - which was 2008 technology - the group had ended up with a mishmash of third party tools for export and import out of Oracle, including IBM Cognos Executive Viewer and others. Sandals uses an Oracle accounting system, but was having to plug gaps and do a lot of manual and Excel-based reporting off-screen. That means, Lawler says, not just issues in connecting all the data from all those entities, but limited abilities for forecasting and budgeting. The challenge is that after decades of organic growth, the company had ended up with many moving parts and multiple different operating entities. ‘Many moving parts’įounded in 1981 and with properties from Saint Vincent to Saint Lucia via Grenada and Jamaica, Sandals - more formally, Sandals International Resorts - is a market leader in the high-end inclusive resort space with its Sandals and Beaches brands. ![]() Unable to resist the metaphor - and we’ll let him go for it - the firm’s Irish-born, but Jamaican-based, Chief Financial Officer, Conor Lawler, says that what was once a “rocky and rough” reporting situation is now as smooth as one of his firm’s famously sandy beachfronts.Įven though we've only got 20 resorts, we actually have 120 separate entities making up the group - so we needed to take everything back in house and simplify the process to get it up to date. Caribbean vacation specialist Sandals says a move to a unified finance platform has eased a number of accounting headaches - and is also saving $400,000 to $500,000 a year by ending the use of external consultants to manage end-of-year consolidation and reporting. ![]()
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