How Matchbox simply makes payment reconciliation more secure

The customer

«The Alpina Gstaad» is a five-star hotel in an exclusive hillside position in the Bernese Oberland. Since opening on 1 December 2012, the hotel has been meeting the highest standards of style and elegance in the 5-star sector.

For its guests, «The Alpina Gstaad» offers its own Michelin-starred restaurant, three other restaurants and a Six Senses Spa.

The challenge

Whether the issue is defaults of specific credit card payments, overlapping days, missing payments or untraceable sales: Like in many hotels, reconciling different electronic payments also takes a lot of time at «The Alpina Gstaad». There is also the high number of different revenue streams – whether it’s the four different restaurants or the Six Senses Spa.

«At some point it just becomes too much. It’s then laborious to check each individual transaction manually», says Nadine Friedli, Deputy General Manager/Finance & Administration Director at «The Alpina Gstaad», summarising the basic situation facing many finance departments.

That’s why she wanted a software solution to make things easier for her team and for her – and to make the reconciliation and posting processes much more secure at the same time.

The solution

Nadine Friedli quickly came across Matchbox from treibauf – a software that, on the one hand, automates payment reconciliation and posting and, on the other, provides insights into the structure of payments and fees.

Once the individual requirements had been discussed in a meeting with the treibauf team, the setup was designed by treibauf project manager Ronnie Rupff and his team: the Protel PMS and the Mirus Finance accounting software could be connected to Matchbox relatively quickly using the open interfaces. The software imports the data from these sources and automatically reconciles it.

The result

Nadine Friedli and her team can now see at a glance which payments match – and where they specifically need to take a closer look. According to Nadine Friedli, the software’s modern user interface is so clear and intuitive that many different colleagues can work with it – including the night auditor, or the teams from accounting and the front office.

The software not only makes the monthly reconciliation easier. It also creates far greater certainty that everything has been posted correctly. An example? Misleadingly designed user interfaces of online payment services can quickly lead to human error: in the case of online payment service providers, for example, postings are only ‘reserved’ after one click despite a green signal – and are only actually paid after a second click. If that’s overlooked, large amounts can quickly go missing!

«With Matchbox we can simply see much quicker if a mistake has been made somewhere. This certainty shouldn’t be underestimated!», says Nadine Friedli, getting to the heart of the matter.

Thanks to the integrated Payment Analytics Center, Matchbox also gives the team valuable insights into the structures of payment methods and the fees for the respective payments: «We can now see at a glance, for example, which cards our guests have used to pay – and which fees have been incurred as a result.»