TSA Solutions is a leading provider of measurable revenue performance-enhancing solutions for the hotel industry in the Americas, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. As an upselling specialist, the company offers consultancy services for functions across hotel ops – including front desk & rooms, food & beverage, phone reservations, spa, sales, and meetings & events – that help drive both business and human performance while leveraging the power of the industry.
Alongside its training services, TSA offers a robust reporting platform with data visualization and analytics, allowing customers to track employee, revenue and benchmark performance – packages which can be upgraded across chains or brands to ensure a connected experience across stays and optimized upselling opportunities for customers. In business since 1987, TSA’s services have been used by hospitality giants including Marriott, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, Hilton, and Radisson.
As its solutions drive hospitality teams to become more agile, TSA was also looking to increase agility itself and autoflow data from Salesforce, its CRM and master database, to Xero, its accounting software. As both applications are SaaS, they were hoping to bi-directionally sync data between the two platforms, creating a seamless workflow for processing invoices. “Our company was growing and so were our invoices,” said Jeanne Gwee, an accountant at TSA Solutions. “Previously, our billing was done manually. We’d have to export a CSV file from Salesforce and then manipulate and upload the content line-by-line to view the customer.”
“That was very time consuming and not efficient. So, we wanted something that was seamless, something that would be able to talk to Salesforce and send the data to Xero straightaway without us touching it and streamlines invoicing for our various partners and we found that in Workato,” she added.
APPS
- Xero
- Salesforce
- Custom Scheduling/Calendar Tracking Tool
Challenges
As the global leader in hotel upselling solutions who recently changed its business model and received an influx of new clients, TSA was looking for a way to bi-directionally sync its CRM and master database, Salesforce, with its accounting software, Xero, as the manual processing of thousands of invoices wasn’t conceivable by the finance team.
ROI With Workato
Less than a month after launching an automated workflow between Salesforce and Xero, the finance team has its reduced manual work by 60% and streamlines invoicing for thousands of hotel partners monthly. With future updates, the team hopes to bring it up to 80%, leaving the remaining 20% for complex scenarios and processes not yet built.
Change in Business Model Leads to Enterprise Automation
In 2017, TSA changed its business model from revenue share to fixed fee to better position itself to offer services to an entire corporate chain or market share, not just individual hotels. Upon doing so, its business grew rapidly from billing up to hundreds of invoices per month to thousands. To support this, the company began looking for a solution that streamlines invoicing for potentially thousands of partners and automatically sync data between its two core apps as the finance team couldn’t do it on their own. “We could not cope with doing it manually as it would result in late billing as well as human errors,” Gwee said.
“There were too many invoices to be done, so we decided to look outward because we thought there has to be a third party that could help us with this.”
Gwee’s team initially turned to another vendor who’s helped them adopt or implement tools before, but they found it hard to execute an autoflow between the two apps and ultimately turned to Workato.
“The connectors and recipes were so easy to work with and build,” Gwee said. “It was myself and two other colleagues who helped build the workflow and we were able to get the Xero-Salesforce integration up and running – from education about the platform to launch – in less than a month.”
How Automation Streamlines Invoicing From Across the Globe
With hotels in China, Europe, and the Americas, for example, TSA deals with different VAT/GST or sales taxes imposed on its services based on region. Gwee and her team worked with Workato to ensure that the transfer of data was compliant per client and that the currency rates were accurately reflected prior to sending an invoice.
“We invoice customers worldwide so some of the customers might be in USD, might be in pounds, Euro, Sing dollars, et cetera. With Workato, we’re able to pull the [daily exchange] rate from XE.com, which has helped us out a lot,” Gwee said.
“We’re able to work with Workato to satisfy our requirements and that’s been invaluable to us.”
Agile Integrations for a Fast-Growing Company
For the coaching side of the business, TSA uses an internal system that tracks trainers’ calendars for client meetings. It is through these scheduled appointments that TSA bills clients based on services rendered. Though the system was built in-house, the company needed a platform that was agile enough to be able to integrate its custom platform with hub apps like Salesforce and were able to do it through Workato. “It’s been very awesome,” said Gwee. “The process has been very smooth. It’s already reduced the amount of manual work we have to do on our end by 60% for both consulting and analytics invoice processing.”
“There’s about 20% of the work that we have to do manually because we haven’t built processes for them yet – for example, the creation of training days because we [the finance team] can’t see them until our trainers have completed their sessions – but to have reduced manual work by that much in that amount of time is impressive,” she added.
“We’d love to get to 80% of our total workflows being auto-completed, which I’m sure is possible through the power of Workato and what we’ve already seen,” Gwee concluded.
