LBA Hospitality

As president of LBA Hospitality, a full-scale hotel management, development and consulting firm based in Dothan, Ala., Beau Benton is known for setting a high bar for guest satisfaction throughout the hospitality industry. With nearly 50 years of experience in superior hospitality management under its belt, LBA manages more than 70 properties throughout the Southeast. Having such an expansive portfolio, Benton is responsible for providing his hotels with up-to-date financial data daily. For years, Benton and his team relied on a medley of accounting solutions for its financial management, but because the various systems did not communicate with one another, Benton was forced to export data manually in order to get a sense of the bigger picture.

“Our hodgepodge of systems was low cost, at least on the surface, but required more labor with little flexibility and didn’t provide a way to compile data for monthly reports,” Benton said. “Our daily reporting system relied on manual entry from a night auditor, and our monthly data had to be entered into a separate accounting system. In addition, our accounts payable was entered by the corporate accounting team after the invoices were sent from the property to the home office where they were filed in a huge storage room.”

As the delay and the cost of overnighting weekly invoice packets took its toll on the growing company, Benton set out to implement a more efficient, cost-effective and intelligent cloud-based accounting platform.

After hearing about M3 from industry peers, Benton decided to make the switch. As a powerful cloud-based financial platform used by more than 5,000 management groups and hotels of all sizes around the globe, M3 offered Benton the flexibility he’d been looking for.

Since 2013, M3 has provided each of LBA’s hotels with tailormade financial and operational data. This customization and automation have decreased their need for data manipulation and manual reporting. Through Accounting Core, M3’s entry-point solution, Benton and his team have access to robust accounting and financial analysis for all their hotels, while M3’s Insight works as LBA’s back-office business analytics tool, increasing the company’s efficiencies and reducing expenses.

In addition to time and money savings through M3, LBA found that onboarding new hoteliers were a seamless transition, as most of them were already familiar with M3. Used by over half of the top management companies in the U.S., M3 is developed, designed, and deployed to make a hotelier’s life easier and has become a universal language within the hospitality industry.

“Because of the wide acceptance of M3 in the hotel industry, many hoteliers have used the system in the past and are familiar with it,” Benton said. “Recently, when talking to a hotel owner about our management services, they were thrilled to hear we use M3 because they know they have access to operational and accounting data in real time.”