Easily create a solid revenue budget based directly on your past performance data and use this budget to track your performance throughout the year.
The Budgeting Tool
The goal of this product is simple – to help you easily create a solid revenue budget based directly on your past performance data and to help you use this budget to track your performance throughout the year. In addition to the revenue budget, we’ve also added ‘revenue booked’ goals and a forecast for guest check-ins. Like the revenue budget, both are built directly from your historical performance data based upon the options you select in our simple to use wizard. The booked revenue goals will help you plan for and drive the performance of your reservationist/sales team, while the guest check-in forecast will help you accurately plan the number of turns, staffing, household amenities, etc.
Why It’s Important
Budgeting, and the timing of this product release, is important for a number of reasons.
First, 2020 was a unique year by all accounts, and the booking, revenue, and check-in trends followed different patterns than past years. Ensuring that you and your team have accurate budgets, goals, and forecasts for 2021 is more important than ever. Our tool is designed to simplify this process, using your own historical data, to ensure you have budgets and goals you can count on.
Second, and perhaps more important, is our desire to help ensure that all our partners, big and small, have the opportunity to have strong, data-driven financials for 2021. I was honored last month to host VRMA’s webinar on “Data-Driven Property Managers.” I tried to speak from the heart and share what I’ve learned from property managers that have been the most successful in our space. As I explained, I believe it all starts with having a solid P&L and set of financial books, with clear budgets and goals. I walked through several key metrics or ‘needle movers’ that I suggest you consider using for each of your departments, all tying back to your P&L, budgets, and goals. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, I would invite you to watch it. While it wasn’t about Key Data, I think it had some great examples of charts and metrics that will prove very useful to you and your organization.
Lastly, the trend of increasingly professional, data-driven organizations moving into our space will not slowdown in 2021. The hotels, the big brands, and the well-funded teams are here to stay, and they are pushing us all to get better and to get better quickly. We’ve made great progress over the last two years as an industry in refining our revenue management metrics and practices, but a significant portion of our industry is still operating without a strong, structured P&L and an accurate revenue budget in place.
We’ve worked hard to put this new Budgeting tool out to attack this problem head-on. It’s live in your dashboard, and it comes with a free 30-day trial to allow you to test it out over the coming weeks. It's quick and easy to get going, and we hope you’ll take the time to try it out. As always, we are here to help and committed to working with you one-on-one to ensure you’re successful.
Thank you for your support, and we look forward to your feedback!