100% Electronic invoice submission at Novum Hospitality

186
hotels

+67 locations
in Europe

+24.900
hotel rooms

The starting point

Novum Hospitality is one of the major hotel chains in Germany. In 2017, the company’s headquarters, located in Hamburg, is literally filled with boxes containing approximately 10,000 invoices waiting to be processed. The administrative team (AP and AR) make up of 30 people has a heavy workload as they have to manage the delivery and reconciliation of each invoice manually.

At the same time, when managing the 150 hotels of the chain, front-office employees also spend time and resources printing guests’ invoices and resending them by email or post, as well as with repetitive and manual tasks that can result on errors or lost invoices.

While expanding and growing in the number of hotels each year, Novum Hospitality decides to automate the submission of invoices for all its clients (B2G, B2B and B2C).

The administrative team manages the delivery and reconciliation of each invoice manually.

The onboarding plan includes specific training for back-office and front-desk employees.

The solution

Novum Hospitality digitizes the submission of 100% of its invoices via Bavel. The first stage of the project starts with the integration of Bavel and Protel. After the integration, a pilot for the 100% submission is launched with 2 hotels. Once the pilot is finished and the whole process is frictionless, an onboarding plan for the businesses of the chain is implemented. This includes training for the back-office and front-desk employees.

The 100% invoice submission at Novum Hospitality using Bavel also allows the delivery of invoices to the public administration (B2G), complying with the specification of each country.

“After Bavel’s implementation, invoices are no longer lost and only on a few occasions we notice discrepancies, which we can solve quicker thanks to the digitalization of the process. Besides, the amount of manual tasks for the administrative team has decreased drastically”, explains Alexander Nowack, Senior Business Process Manager at Novum Hospitality.

The outcome

At present, 118 Novum Hospitality’s hotels operate with Bavel successfully. Up until 2017, Novum Hospitality has opened 36 hotels and raised the invoicing volume a 60% without having to increase the administrative team. Thanks to the electronic submission and the automation reconciliation, Novum Hospitality has also reduced the average collection time in 7 days. The boxes filled with invoices have disappeared from Novum Hospitality’s headquarters, as Bavel has a digital storage archive that complies with the legislation requirements of each country (Germany, Austria and the Netherlands…). Novum Hospitality’s headquarters could also save in the usage of paper.

The hotel chain expects to finish the onboarding process of all its hotels in 2021 and start new digitalization processes next to Bavel, as a technology partner.

Up until 2017, Novum has opened 36 hotels and raised the invoicing volume a 60% without having to increase the administrative team.