How Aspire helps Ashley Hotel Group streamline financial processes and eliminate manual payments

Meet Ashley Hotel Group, Indonesia’s most promising hotel group with brilliant business growth

Ashley Hotel Group is an Indonesian hotel group that has existed since 2015. Although the Group is relatively new to the Indonesian hospitality scene, it has proven to be one of the rising stars in the hotel industry.

Since its inception, the Group has successfully managed and operated 10 hotels in Greater Jakarta under brands such as Ashley, Stanley, Juno, and Yellow Bee. These strategically located hotels strive to provide high-quality services, resulting in consistently high occupancy rates.

Despite its success, the Group is eager to reach further milestones as it plans to operate another hotel by the end of 2024 and two more in 2025. The expansion is in line with the company's vision to become a local hotel group that grows steadily every year and strives to offer accommodation services that are accessible to all groups of people.

Challenges: With growing business, Ashley Hotel Group needs to streamline financial operations

1. The company needs a hand to manage petty cash

The Ashley Hotel Group has proven that it will soon be a powerhouse in the hotel industry. However, as the company grows faster, its financial operations become more complicated.

One of the biggest financial challenges for the company is managing its petty cash.

In its day-to-day operations, every hotel under the Ashley Hotel Group needs petty cash to fund immediate or minor operational expenses, such as document delivery fees or fuel for company vehicles. However, each hotel does not manage its petty cash fund independently. Instead, it was handled by only one department: the finance and accounting department at the head office.

In order to manage petty cash for all hotels, Ashley Hotel Group urgently needed a financial operating system that could efficiently centralize petty cash management, receipt verification and reimbursement approval.

2. Manual payments to vendors

Managing petty cash was not the only challenge for the Ashley Hotel Group.

The group knew that transactions with vendors would become more frequent as the number of its hotels increased. However, the Group had to spend a lot of time making payments to vendors because every transaction was done manually, and it did not use internet banking services to transfer money. Therefore, if the Group had to make payments to 100 vendors, it had to go to the bank and make 100 transfers manually, which was perceived as time-consuming.

With these challenges in mind, the Group urgently needed a solution to streamline vendor payment processes to save operating time.

Solution: Aspire helps Ashley Hotel Group to have efficient financial management processes

The Group realized that these problems needed to be solved immediately. Fortunately, it finally found the light at the end of the tunnel after meeting Aspire at an event in Jakarta.

The Group’s interest in Aspire grew significantly after learning that Aspire also offered cashback for all payments made via its corporate cards, which the Group believed could save on operating costs.

After thorough consideration, the Group finally decided to use Aspire's Business Account, Corporate Card, and Expense Management products from 2023. After a year, the Group found that Aspire had not only helped it save time but also significantly reduced costs.

1. More efficient petty cash management thanks to Aspire

The Group said Aspire has made the management of its petty cash more efficient by allowing it to put operational funds, including petty cash, onto Aspire’s virtual corporate cards for employees to use for their day-to-day operations. Currently, the Group said it has 20 corporate cards in use, which have been distributed to each of its ten hotels and each department.

In addition, the Group also said that Aspire’s user interface is easy to use, making it more convenient and faster for its employees to submit claims and upload proof of transactions.

2. Aspire enables easy transfers with just a few clicks

Also, thanks to Aspire, the Group no longer has to spend much time going to the bank just to pay vendors.

With Aspire, it can process any payment to many vendors with just a few clicks in its Aspire dashboard in real-time and at any time, saying goodbye to the time-consuming manual transfer process.

Overall, the Group said Aspire has helped it save 80-90% of operating time and save Rp60 million through cashback on electricity, water and phone bill payments via Aspire corporate cards.

The Group has found that Aspire has brought so many benefits to its financial operations that it is even considering using more Aspire features, particularly invoice management, which allows businesses to create and send invoices with just a few clicks.