How Matchbox helps accounting experts save valuable time

The customer

«Michel Reybier Hospitality» is an international group of luxury hotels, restaurants and spas. The company’s goal is to offer guests unique wellness destinations and to create memorable moments in relaxed ambiances.

The challenge

Payment reconciliation of credit card payments used to tie up a lot of valuable resources in the various accounting departments of Michel Reybier Hospitality: matching each transaction individually required a huge amount of manual work. Not to mention that accounting professionals would, of course, much rather be doing something more interesting instead.

Marina Hays, Group Financial Controller at Michel Reybier Hospitality, had a clear goal of reducing the high manual workload by automating processes – even halving it if possible! Accordingly, she was looking for solutions that would automate the (manual) labour-intensive reconciliation processes as far as possible.

The solution

The electronic payment reconciliation and analytics software Matchbox from treibauf made the shortlist following an international benchmark on a variety of similar solutions. The software imports all PMS and acquirer data, automatically reconciles it, then creates the right posting entries and exports these to the connected ERP.

After an initial meeting with treibauf, at which they discussed individual requirements and the scope, Marina Hays was convinced by the Matchbox product demo. As the group uses three different ERP systems in different countries, Matchbox’s open interfaces were another key argument: the software can connect seamlessly to different ERPs.

The result

Marina Hays then rolled Matchbox out step by step within the group – and introduced her teams to the new tool: first at the Michel-Reybier locations in France, then in Switzerland in the second stage. Eight group subsidiaries are now using Matchbox – and there are already tangible, substantial benefits for the teams there.

«For companies that are using Matchbox, their workload for electronic payment reconciliation has effectively halved all things considered», says Marina Hays, summarising the increase in efficiency thanks to automation. Their financial experts can finally use their capacities for more exciting tasks.

Then there’s the standardisation effect: when it comes to processing payments, the teams in the different countries work with different accounting structures. Some hotels were not documenting payment reconciliation prior to this, for example.

As a side effect to some extent, Matchbox has now applied a common standard in all countries – the perfect foundation for group-wide financial controlling.