Travel Portland Expands Operations by Consolidating Systems

Understanding the situation

Travel Portland, a prominent destination marketing and management organization, wanted to significantly enhance its operational efficiency by transitioning from its existing accounting platforms to Sage Intacct.

Prior to this project, Travel Portland was managing three operating entities in two separate systems, making inter-company tracking and consolidating financial statements a very manual process. Additionally, using massive Excel spreadsheets for data allocations required manual updates and was prone to user errors.

Further, the aim was to integrate its event management solution, Cvent, with Intacct to streamline financial and event operations.

Exploring the challenge

Travel Portland oversees some large events that often have hundreds of transactions associated with seat purchases and other types of tickets. Though the Cvent platform tracks and collects registrations and payments effectively, synchronizing these transactions in their accounting system was an awkward, manual process. A move to Intacct, along with some custom integration, would allow this process to be automated, significantly reducing the administrative burden and the potential for errors.

Moreover, the approval processes were managed outside of all systems, making them manual and cumbersome. These were all areas where Sage Intacct could immediately add efficiencies and automation.

Through careful planning and preparation, the CLA digital team was able to start working in a sandbox environment with just under a month of time available to develop and test the integration so it would be ready for production use by the go-live date.

Achieving results

CLA’s digital professionals helped Travel Portland successfully address its challenges by automating previously manual processes, allowing its finance and event operations teams to concentrate on core tasks.

The project also expedited month-end close processes and improved timely reporting as a result of a consolidated system, intercompany automation, and easier access to data for month end allocations. The organization now gets financial results in one day instead of one month. Bringing transaction approvals into Sage Intacct added much-needed controls — including a system-managed approval workflow and dashboard reporting — allowing budget managers to see real-time impacts to their areas of the business.

Collaborating with CLA, Travel Portland revolutionized their workflow and gained deeper insights to help manage the business. The exposure to CLA’s tools, resources, and innovative approach also opened up opportunities for further automation in other business aspects, setting the stage for continued growth, revenue, and operational efficiency.

Digital transformation can enhance your organization’s agility, boost productivity, and help lower costs through automation and data usage.