Vitruvian Solutions, the leading provider of gratuity management software for the hospitality industry, today announced it has entered into a master services agreement with Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc.
Pursuant to this agreement, Vitruvian Solutions will be rolling out Evention, its event gratuity distribution software, to additional Starwood hotels that manage complex gratuities to compensate banquet and other employees. Starwood properties, including the W Chicago Lakeshore and the Westin Boston Waterfront, have been leveraging Evention to manage the banquet payroll for their properties and improve the performance and accuracy of their gratuity calculations.
“We are thrilled to be selected by Starwood to help automate their gratuity distribution process”, stated Mike Baldinger, partner at Vitruvian Solutions. “Evention is being used to simplify and add process to distributing gratuities at hotels across North America including locations in New York, Boston, Florida, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, and Hawaii. Each region has its own unique process and labor contracts which can be setup and automated with Evention. We are excited to help Starwood streamline this process.”
Evention is the event gratuities management system that changes everything – replacing outdated and inefficient methods with the automated management of wages, gratuities distributions, and adjustments. Evention enables hotels, clubs and convention centers to reduce employee compensation efforts to minutes each week and easily fits into existing payroll processes. To learn more, please visit www.vitruvianllc.com/evention.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with approximately 900 properties in more than 100 countries and 155,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood Hotels is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, W®, Westin®, Le Méridien®, Sheraton®, Four Points® by Sheraton, and the recently launched AloftSM, and Element SM. Starwood Hotels also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high quality vacation interval ownership resorts. For more information, please visit www.starwoodhotels.com.
Posted: 2008-06-06
Evention, Gratuity Distribution software, will be showcased at HITEC 2008 hospitality show
Hotels, clubs, convention centers, and cruise ships manage millions of dollars of payroll manually in Excel spreadsheets as they process banquet payroll, room service, porterage, valet, and other areas that involve complex gratuity distributions and wage calculations. Vitruvian Solutions LLC will be presenting their latest release of Evention, a software solution that automates this process, at the upcoming HITEC 2008 hospitality tradeshow to be held June 16-19, 2008 in Austin, Texas. After launching Evention to the hospitality market at the 2007 HITEC show, the software solution is now being used to manage shift pay and service charge distributions across the country in cities including Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Since the original launch of the product, Vitruvian Solutions built upon its detailed industry research related to the current methodologies used for distributing gratuities and managing complex wages in areas ranging from banquet payroll to room service distribution. Trends vary greatly between cities as labor contracts are negotiated individually. However, even at the city level, great variations in compensation practices for gratuities, wages, covers, and other payroll details can be found in sister hotels just blocks apart.
The labor rules and contracts are constantly evolving. This presents numerous challenges for banquet managers, paymasters, and controllers. For example, in New York City, an upcoming contract negotiation may require hotels to distribute a percentage of room rental in addition to typical food and beverage distributions. Such a change requires process changes and increased labor across numerous departments.
During the 2008 HITEC show, in addition to demonstrating Evention’s capabilities, Vitruvian Solutions will be presenting a number of trends in banquet payroll that have been uncovered while working with hotels and clubs across the country.
Labor contracts for hospitality employees are always developing and management of the wage and gratuity rules grows more complex. Not only are gratuities split in a variety of methods, but additional requirements such as “guaranteed minimum amounts”, “fixed gratuities”, and management of multiple gratuity pools or pay periods must be tracked and paid with accuracy.
In many locations, this complexity is often managed by one or two key banquet or payroll managers that have an intimate knowledge of the employees and the local labor contracts. When these critical personnel are sick, on vacation, or transitioning from the hotel, payroll errors become common as the property struggles to train a new employees to manage this process.
Another issue with the manual process is security. Millions of dollars in banquet revenue are managed by the key employees and often this process relies on manual input and spreadsheets. In some locations fraud becomes an issue as any person that gains access to the spreadsheets can adjust numbers to favor himself or other personnel. In other cases, employees access the payroll data without authorization simply to evaluate their current weekly earnings or to compare compensation to that of their peers. Management of sensitive payroll data in such an unsecure format would not be tolerated in most industries but because of the complexities in banquet payroll, this practice is instead commonplace.
The hospitality industry of course has checks and balances in place to help minimize these issues. Employees and labor unions often require detailed reports on daily or weekly levels to provide comprehensive data behind the pay period’s compensation amounts. In many cases, these reports are manually compiled utilizing the same key personnel that understand the entire process. The time to build these reports can be time consuming and expensive. Audits are another area that require compilation of different time periods of payroll data. In many cases, the audit process can be extremely burdensome and time consuming as employees must examine old spreadsheets or paper trails to rebuild past payroll calculations.
The time involved with the entire gratuity management and payroll process can be significant. Normally, one department (banquets or payroll) shares the majority of the work, but employees may be dedicating a daily percentage of their time to manually recording or compiling this information. Instead of a banquet manager or captain being out on the floor working with clients or other employees, these personnel are often spending time behind a desk in a roll that is not related to their job description. In addition, communication issues between departments can further increase the management time and complexities of this process. When a change to event revenue or to employees’ hours is required, this often requires a manager to track down a person in another department to apply updates. This burden further complicates the entire process.
These general trends along with specific regional details and developments will be part of the information that Vitruvian Solutions will be presenting to attendees at HITEC 2008.
At Vitruvian Solutions, we specialize in helping businesses manage their operations more effectively. With an emphasis on expert design, Vitruvian Solutions creates easy-to-use, flexible, integrated business applications developed with the latest Microsoft technologies. Vitruvian Solutions is a Microsoft Certified Partner and proud recipient of the Microsoft Front Runner Award for Evention.
For more information, visit us at http://www.vitruvianllc.com/evention or view this press release at:
Posted: 2008-04-22
To Meet the Demands of an Evolving Payroll Process, Vitruvian Solutions Unveils Evention Hospitality Payroll Software
Due to a dynamic and demanding workforce, complex labor contracts and increased accounting compliance standards, the payroll process for the hospitality industry is evolving. Vitruvian Solutions has spent time analyzing this changing process and offers a new software solution, Evention, to manage payroll with a focus on the complexities of wage calculations and gratuity distribution.
The hospitality industry is finding that employees and labor contracts are becoming more demanding. With a competitive employment market and demanding labor contracts, employees expect to be paid accurately and at increasingly shorter intervals. In discussions with a number of hotels in the Chicago area, Vitruvian Solutions has found that the days of bi-weekly payroll may be short lived as staff push for a weekly payroll process. Employers must now meet this demand and ensure that employees remain satisfied with the integrity of their paycheck while balancing what has traditionally been a time consuming process to calculate wages and distribute gratuities.
As employees' demands increase so do that of the government, making audit-ready documentation a cornerstone of any business process. In larger organizations, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is now integral to daily operations. Smaller organizations are also adopting these regulations as a "best-practice" and to allow for ease of mergers, IPOs, etc. With payroll data being sensitive and complex, an audit trail from initial time sheets through payroll checks is vital. This audit requirement can hinder a payroll process if not implemented correctly, but can serve as a powerful tool if done right.
With the recent growth in the hospitality industry, employee turnover impacts the entire event payroll process. Due to the high turnover rate in the industry, the payroll process must be able to easily replace employees, and in some cases even allow for sharing of employees between hotels under the same management company. Turnover in the hotel accounting department also requires that the complexity of the payroll process is managed by effective systems and that the departure of key accounting personnel does not negatively impact the payroll process.
To meet the payroll needs of the hospitality industry, Vitruvian Solutions announces the release of Evention 2.0. This is the latest version of their Microsoft Front Runner award winning software that streamlines event payroll for organizations with complex wages and gratuities. Evention enables event administrators to take control of their event payroll by interfacing managers, employee data, payroll data, and event information in a central location that is accessible across a company's intranet. As event managers select employees that work each event, gratuity, wages, and corkage are tallied according to tasks performed. Payroll administrators have instant access to compensation data and can generate payroll detail with the click of a button.
Evention has been developed to handle the complex scheduling and wage and gratuity calculations commonly seen in the event service industry and to do so in a straightforward, easily-maintainable manner. Leveraging the latest technologies, Evention directs payroll data to users with optimal speed allowing managers to spend more time managing their employees and less time with tedious paperwork and data entry.
Evention benefits hotels, caterers, convention centers, casinos, and cruise ships by:
* Streamlining the payroll process and allowing accounting resources to focus on value-added tasks. By implementing Evention, the payroll management time is greatly reduced with significant annual savings. The event managers and accounting department work from a common system, with a centralized database, allowing critical data to be accessible real-time across departments. "The Hyatt Regency Chicago has benefitted tremendously from Evention," said Dan McMenamy, Director of Accounting - Hyatt Regency Chicago. "The user friendly application allowed us to reduce our accounting staff by ½ person making it possible to realize a payback of less than 2 years on our investment." Furthermore, as payroll staff change, the payroll process can continue without the need for lengthy training.
* Eliminating errors in the event payroll and time tracking process. Errors during the payroll processing are common and often involve the time consuming process of issuing manual checks to correct. With Evention, errors are removed by ensuring consistent calculations and eliminating re-entry of data. As stated by Mr. McMenamy from Hyatt, "In addition to accounting savings and efficiencies, employees have great confidence that they are being paid in a very accurate manner. Payroll adjustments have been virtually eliminated in comparison with our former methods and employees seldom disrupt operations with questions and challenges."
* Centralizing systems between departments and eliminating the duplication of data entry. Managers can enter data directly into Evention on their company's intranet, thereby removing the need for paper timesheets to track servers and tasks performed for each event. Accounting departments no longer need to re-enter this data into a separate system but simply process the event and generate the desired reports through Evention. Payroll data can then be exported from Evention directly to an outside payroll processor.
*Tracking of all data transactions and providing the property a complete record of who entered what data and when. In addition, once the payroll administrator establishes the payroll wage and gratuity rules in Evention, they are confident that the payroll will be distributed in the same manner each time payroll is processed.
At Vitruvian Solutions, we specialize in helping businesses manage their operations more effectively. With an emphasis on expert design, Vitruvian Solutions creates easy-to-use, flexible, integrated business applications developed with the latest Microsoft technologies. For more information, visit us at http://www.vitruvianllc.com/evention.
Evention will also be showcased at the HITEC 2007 trade show, June 26-28, 2007, in Orlando, Florida.
More Information:
http://www.prweb.com//releases/hospitality/payroll/prweb533254.htm
Press Contact: Michael Baldinger
Company Name: Vitruvian Solutions
Phone: 773-697-6881
Posted: 2007-06-20