Introducing Folio Expense

Today, we’re announcing Folio Expense, hospitality’s first integrated expense program. It’s fully embedded within our bill pay and procurement platform and loaded with purpose-built features for property managers. Now you have greater control, faster real-time financials, more automation to help your properties operate smoothly, plus more cost savings and rebates. 

The bottom line: Expenses just got easier for on-property teams, faster for finance, and more profitable for you.

Painful p-card peril (not for the faint of heart!)

Today, many hotels work hard to have their properties buy contracted items from approved suppliers. But we all know that “off program” or “petty cash” spend happens. When it does, the reconciliation process can be painful. Often, this extra spend is put on a physical card and kept in a ziplock bag of receipts. If someone needs to run out to buy extra champagne for an event, lettuce due to a distributor shortage, or an emergency plunger, they take out the card and head to the store. After shopping, they stuff the card and receipts back in the bag. 

At the end of the month, the GM or DOF downloads the card statement and accounts for every transaction, coding each to a specific department and spend category. It’s tedious. They uncrumble the receipts, refer to notes, scan, and attach them to an expense report for finance teams to review. Finally, finance reviews the expenses to ensure they are appropriately mapped to the correct budgets (hopefully there’s budget for that champagne, somewhere!) and reformats the report to upload it to an accounting system.

Just WRITING the last two paragraphs was a slog. Think about how much time all that reviewing and reconciliation takes! There’s no time to optimize your spend when you’re drowning in processes that make it more complicated. 

Digitize and control with Folio Expense

Folio Expense automates the entire expense management and accounting process. In minutes, program admins can issue cards for each department, specific users, or dedicated projects. Each card can have spend limits, vendor restrictions, or specific linked GL codes so spend automatically categorizes with each transaction. There are immediate and compounding admin benefits when a property uses Folio Expense. Folio already has connectivity to your accounting system. It also builds on existing context regarding budgets, roles, and permissions at your properties. 

Instead of a slush fund with the maximum-possible credit limit, spend is tightly controlled, tethered to specific allocated funds, approved exceptions, and tied to the budgets you already have set in Folio.

For the rare times when a personal card is still needed, Folio can also support fully digitized reimbursements. When a teammate uploads a personal card expense, the receipt auto-transcribes and is automatically compared to the transaction details. It’s auto-coding magic! 

Faster financials

When an expense is paid and processed through Folio Expense, it maps to the bottom line in real time. Approvals and accounting happen right as these transactions occur or get submitted, rather than sitting and waiting to be confronted at month-end. 

There are no reconciliation steps, just approvals. GL Codes and transactions sync with your ERP for a completely touchless solution.

If you are using Folio Expense with Folio Bills or Folio Pay, your teams have fewer programs to manage, and fewer platforms to reconcile. That means faster training times, fewer errors, and more real-time financials.

Centralize to optimize

Wait, did someone say “more rebates”? We did.

A more accessible, robust pCard program means more compliance. Minimize any money fronting with personal cards. You can easily access a card from your Apple or Google Wallet. Folio can help identify opportunities to convert personal card spend to approved expense card spend. Now *every* time you pay, you can optimize your spend.

The property detail that hospitality managers need

Sharing expenses across properties is painful. Folio supports multi-entity accounting and real-time transfers to automatically reconcile the cash flow, not just the expense. We also support the workflows for those properties to dispute any charges. 

No other expense management solution offers managers this level of on-property, across-property, and intra-property expense splitting control and auto-reconciliation. 

The reality is, when you operate in the real world, buying just doesn’t always go as planned. When you need to rectify an issue, you want a platform that understands how to reconcile across the platform. Folio does just that.

Unified Spend Management

With the addition of Expense to the Folio suite, Folio has developed the first centralized spend management platform purpose-built for hospitality. Managers can centrally manage and control across all operational spend: from approved suppliers to the pesky “extra” off-platform expenses. On-property teams can reliably buy and pay for whatever they need from one system, with familiar workflows.

Implementing a smarter system like Folio is the most important thing an operation can do to better manage financial operations. With spend in one place, you can make the most out of every dollar and boost rebates for more profitability. You can think of Folio as a hotel manager’s live checkbook, helping guide and nudge outcomes to deliver on the strategy of the operation. It’s a tool as dynamic, and self-improving, as the hotel itself.