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 uncrumple 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
Joshua Herron, Director of Platform Technology & Business Intelligence at Innisfree Hotels, shared, “Petty cash is the primary cause of every property closing its books late. No one else has been able to figure this out for us. Folio has always been a great partner, which is why we are extremely excited to better manage property spend with Folio Expense.”
Josh said it well: real-time financial visibility is paramount for these operations. Well, good news. With Folio Expense, when an expense is paid and processed, it maps to the bottom line in real time. There are no reconciliation steps, just approvals. GL Codes and transactions sync with your ERP for a completely touchless solution. Approvals, actual journal entries, and even resulting payments flow automatically as you split expenses, rather than sitting and waiting to be confronted at month-end.
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”? Indeed, we did.
A more accessible, robust "p-card" program does not just mean faster accounting. It means fewer expenses land on personal cards. That means more rewards and savings for the program manager.
As buying happens, Folio can help identify opportunities to convert personal card spend to approved expense card spend. Moreover, a platform that connects procurement and expense cards, can help identify missed opportunities for on-program spend, so it is self-correcting over time.
Moreover, with full visibility into the invoices that have come in and been paid, someone paid with an expense card, Folio can help detect that and flag that invoice as paid proactively.
So now *every* time you pay, you know you can capture opportunities to better optimize your spend.
Delivering details that hospitality managers need
In hospitality, there are often shared expenses across properties. One property may need to buy items in bulk, but split them across their other local properties. Sometimes corporate directors offer field support, counsel or training to specific properties, and split the trip costs across the properties.
Folio supports multi-entity accounting and real-time transfers to not just manage these shared expenses, but automatically handle the cash flow transfers intra-property. We also support the workflows for those invoiced properties to dispute any charges.
No other expense management solution offers managers this level of expense-splitting controls and workflows both from an on-property and across-property perspective.
Unified Spend Management
There are immediate and compounding systems, security and admin benefits when a property uses Folio Expense, rather than supporting an additional expense card program. Folio already has connectivity and trusted processes to talk to your accounting system. It also builds on existing context regarding budgets, roles, and permissions at your properties. On-property teams can reliably buy and pay for whatever they need from one system, with familiar workflows.
With the addition of Expense to our Folio suite, Folio has developed the first centralized spend management platform purpose-built for hospitality. It’s an exciting addition, and the reconciliation magic is just beginning.
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. Folio's tool kit of automations are as dynamic, and self-improving, as the hotel itself.