Manual invoice entry
Supplier invoices were entered by hand, one transaction at a time.
Customer story
From hand-keyed invoices to one finance system.
Crerar Hotels has run its group finance on DataFlow since 2005. A small central team looks after every operating hotel in one system, with revenue, payroll, purchasing and stock data flowing in from the group’s hospitality platforms, now on Clarity.
“It’s as good as it can possibly be. It’s good value, the system just works, and the support’s been great.”
Industry
Hospitality
With DataFlow since
2005
Primary use
Centralised group finance
Current platform
Clarity
About Crerar Hotels
A collection of hotels across Scotland and the Lakes.
Crerar Hotels is a collection of ten luxury hotels and inns set in some of the most scenic corners of Scotland and the Lake District, from Loch Fyne, Oban Bay and the Isle of Mull on the west coast to Dunkeld, Pitlochry and Lake Grasmere.
The portfolio spans castle hotels, spa resorts and Highland inns, including Fonab Castle, Dunkeld House Hotel and the Isle of Mull Hotel & Spa. Many of the properties sit in remote locations where the scenery is the draw, with warm, personal hospitality as the common thread across the group.
The pain
Every invoice keyed by hand.
Twenty years ago, Crerar’s finance operation was almost entirely manual. Every supplier invoice was keyed by hand, and front-of-house figures had to be pulled from the hotel systems as reports, typed into spreadsheets and sent in to the accounts team.
Simply getting transactions into the accounts took a team of processors, and the same figures were handled twice: once in the hotels’ systems, and again by hand on their way into the accounts.
Figures re-typed into Excel
Front-of-house numbers were typed into spreadsheets before they reached the accounts.
No flow between systems
Nothing moved from the hotels’ operational systems into finance without manual work.
A team built around keying
Several processors were needed simply to get transactions into the accounts.
“If you went back 20 years, everything was manual, absolutely everything. Literally every single invoice had to be manually keyed.”
Why DataFlow
One system that sees everything.
Crerar’s hotels sit in remote and island locations where finance staff cannot realistically be recruited, so the group has always needed finance to run from one central office. In 2005, the financial controller at the time put DataFlow forward as the system to run it on, and the finance director backed the move away from manual processing.
DataFlow became the single place where the group’s finances land. Revenue, bankings and nominal postings for every hotel company sit in one system, managed by one central team rather than finance people based at each property, roughly halving the number of people the work would otherwise need.
“Pretty much 99.999% of all the transactions for every company that we’re involved with go through DataFlow.”
Why DataFlow remains the right fit
Consistent reporting, deep history, quick answers.
Two decades and a change of ownership later, DataFlow is still the group’s financial platform, for reasons that are practical rather than sentimental.
Many of the people who read Crerar’s numbers are not accountants. They learn to find their way around a report in a particular format, and DataFlow has let the finance team keep that format stable for years, even as hotels, systems and owners changed around it.
01
History back to 2005
Twenty years of records stay on the system for the questions that come back years later.
02
Easy to learn
The system is user friendly: new starters who have never seen DataFlow before get comfortable quickly.
03
Support from people you know
Queries go to people who know the group’s setup, not an anonymous inbox.
04
Value that benchmarks well
Whenever contracts have been benchmarked, DataFlow has come out as reasonable value.
“With DataFlow support, it’s not just an email address that you go to. You actually know the person that’s coming back to you, and that makes it much easier to talk a problem through.”
Growing the group
New owners, more hotels, one reporting structure.
Crerar Hotel Group changed hands in 2023, and the new owners wanted every hotel under their ownership reporting in the same way. After seeing the regular, consistent information already coming out of Crerar’s system, they consolidated group finance with the central Crerar team.
Several additional hotels were brought onto the existing DataFlow setup as a result. Each had previously reported in its own format, on a system that was not suited to its transaction volumes. They were created as new companies in DataFlow, replicating the same nominal structure, nominal codes and reporting the group already ran, with the DataFlow team handling the copy across.
The wider group was soon reporting on a single, consistent basis, and the finance team describes the whole exercise as a straightforward one.
“The new owners saw what was coming out of our system, and they liked the fact that they were getting regular information.”
The move to Clarity
A new generation after twenty years.
Crerar moved from the previous generation of DataFlow to Clarity around a year and a half ago, a step driven by the technology behind the product. After two decades on the old system, the team took a couple of months to settle in, and found that most things worked the way they always had, in a newer format.
The clearest difference is reporting speed. Full transaction lists, the kind auditors ask for, previously had to be run in sections because long reports would time out. In Clarity they run in a single pass and export to Excel, PDF or Word as needed.
“Reports run a lot, lot quicker. You can just run the whole print in one go in Clarity now, and you can export it in different formats.”
Life on Clarity
Period-end data drops straight in from every system.
Today, nearly everything is done centrally. The hotels issue invoices for group reservations and submit payroll hours; almost everything else runs through the finance team in Clarity, working alongside the group’s specialist hospitality systems rather than replacing them. Around 95% of transactions arrive as file imports rather than keying.
Reservations & revenue
Period revenue and cash reports come out of the Guestline PMS as CSV files and drop straight into Clarity.
Payroll
Hotel hours are processed through For Hospitality, and the payroll reports load into Clarity the same way.
Purchasing
Over 90% of supplier invoices arrive through suppliers onboarded to Procure Wizard, ready to import.
Stock
Stock data is pulled from the group’s stock system and loaded without re-keying.
Then 7–8 processors keying transactions
Now 2 processors handling exceptions
What remains for the central team is the exception work: a small number of invoices from local trades that sit outside the purchasing platform, and the accrual journals posted at period end.
Each period, the team moves easily between the hotel companies to produce its sales and wages reports, P&L and balance sheet, which feed the reporting the board relies on.
“The fact you can just get it in a file and dump it in is brilliant, because you can pull the information from anywhere.”
The verdict
A relationship on first-name terms.
Twenty years in, the finance team still deals with the same few people at DataFlow, and describes the relationship as a friendly one, where it is easy to talk a problem through with someone who already knows the setup.
9/10 recommendation
“It’s a really reliable product. You can send an email and within five minutes you’ve got a response back, either by email or somebody’s phoned you to sort it for you.”
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