Streamlining Financial Operations at Soho House with automated integrations with Sage 200-Professional ERP System.

Soho House is a global hospitality brand known for delivering premium member experiences across its houses, hotels, and venues worldwide. As the organisation continued to expand its operations globally across East Asia, Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America. Soho House operates within the hospitality sector, offering members exclusive spaces to eat, stay, work, and connect. The organisation manages complex financial operations across multiple locations across the globe, multiple currencies, and localisations. 

Logo for SOHO HOUSE featuring a stylized grid of nine squares and the text 'SOHO HOUSE' below.

Efficient and accurate AR and AP processes in the business are critical to maintaining system integrity and supporting seamless day-to-day operations. As transaction volumes increase, reliable systems become essential to ensure accuracy, compliance, and scalability.  

Business Challenges.

The business encountered challenges managing regional data processing, such as supplier invoice posting, the EPOS takings posting into Accounts Receivable, data transfers from other legacy systems such as accommodation booking, restaurant takings, reconciliations, and other regional tax/VAT reporting. Additionally, managing journal approval workflows within other third-party systems and transferring journal data manually into the ERP System was extremely difficult and time-consuming.  

Due to a high volume of transactions processed through the frontend legacy systems that require posting to the ERP System, managing the data flows in time was extremely challenging. Some of the important systems include: 

  • Accounts Payable: Forth’s ADACO, BirchStreet-Accounts Payable for Food and Beverage (FnB) invoices, Rossum for services invoices, SAP-Concur for employee expenses, as well as other regional AP Systems used at various companies globally.  

It was extremely challenging for each site and its users to manually transfer data to over 120 companies within the ERP system. This affected the timely processing of vendor payments, the recognition of costs in management accounts, and ledger closures, leaving staff overstretched. Also, it lacked visibility into transaction-related supplier documents within the ERP system because documents were not linked to the transactions, making it difficult to verify transaction values. 

  • Accounts Receivable: At Soho House’s different sites globally, different EPOS systems are used locally in different regions. The legacy systems used include Oracle’s Opera, Micros, as well as other systems such as B4T, Amex, Cardnet, VISA, G-Pay, Apple-Pay, GEM-Pay and various other regional EPOS and accommodation booking systems. 

With some of the companies having over 20-30 sites, downloading receivables data, analysing it and preparing it in the import file format to upload into the ERP System was a huge task that required too many staff to handle the data. While the AR staff was about to finalise and complete the data upload into the ERP system for the previous week, they would approach the end of another week. This put the AR team under tremendous pressure, which could lead to human errors while preparing import data files, and additional efforts in correcting the imported data. Thus,affecting recognition of correct revenue, as well as closure of ledgers in the ERP system, further delaying the reporting deadlines, including incurring additional staff costs.  

  • Journal Workflow Management: At Soho House globally, they implemented a journal workflow system “BlackLine” to review and approve the general ledger journal entries. While journal approval workflow was managed within the BlackLine system, the final journal posting was sent to the ERP System. Importing thousands of line journals into the ERP System was not only time-consuming but equally difficult for the user to manage the process when the system would become slow and hang during the data file import process. This affected user performance and time completion of activities, including reimporting the files with the required corrections, thus delaying ledger closures and periodic management reporting.  

  • Regional Tax/VAT Reporting: Due to varied reporting requirements of VAT Transactions and report submissions at the regional level, the standard reports available within the ERP system were not sufficient for the non-UK entities. The companies in other regions were unable to generate the required reports and complete reconciliation. Hence, it was difficult for the regional finance teams to prepare the required reports to submit to the tax authorities.  

ACS-APT Solutions:

ACS-APT, as the ERP Solution provider and the support partner of Soho House, studied and analysed the requirements and proposed fully integrated end-to-end automated solutions to each of the problems outlined by Soho House.  

  • All the AP processes (Forth’s ADACO, SAP-Concur, Rossum, BirchStreet, and other systems) have been fully end-to-end auto-integrated with the Sage200 ERP System. The legacy systems send the data files to the centralised SFTP site, which are processed automatically at a set time interval, posting data into the ERP System. The full workflow of data validations, email notification and transaction posting into each company in the ERP system is handled systematically, including attaching the supporting documents to the imported transactions so that users can see them within the system without searching for a physical document outside the ERP system. 

  • ACS studied the scope of the legacy systems and EPOS systems being used at various regional sites managing the revenue takings at Soho House. ACS proposed to standardise the file formats used by different sites for each of the legacy systems and process of the daily data file deployment to the centralised SFTP sites, ACS developed a fully automated integration solution to handle the data files generated by the different systems. With the agreed workflow process to handle data validation and import, all the legacy systems in scope have been integrated with the ERP System. This has simplified the AR handling process and revenue reconciliation, making it more timely and efficient by saving on human resource costs, and more importantly, sped up the ledger closures during period-ends. 

  •  ACS developed and implemented an SFTP-based and Windows Service-scheduled, fully automated end-to-end integration between the BlackLine System and the Sage200-ERP System. The approved journal files with 10’s of thousands of lines are now being sent by the BlackLine System, which are auto-scheduled to validate and imported into each company within the Sage200-ERP System. This helped the end users from manually importing the files and watching the import screen for hours until the file imports completed. Users were able to spend the saved time managing other activities, thus speeding up other processes too.

  • ACS-APT studied the regional companies’ local tax reporting requirements and proposed a solution that can be run by the Windows Service scheduler or as and when required by the end users. The automation involved allowing users to flag the required transactions within the ERP System for Tax/VAT submission and further analysis. The customised reports were developed in the user-required formats, making the tax transactions reconciliation process simpler, thus speeding up report submission to the tax authority.  

This case study explores how ACS-APT has revolutionised financial operations for one of the world's most prestigious hospitality brands. Through sophisticated system integrations, automated data processing, and innovative workflow solutions, ACS-APT has empowered Soho House to streamline complex multi-venue operations, enhance financial accuracy, and achieve remarkable operational efficiency. The results? Eliminated manual processes, real-time financial visibility across global locations, and substantial cost savings within the first year of implementation. 

Conclusion.

ACS-APT's sophisticated integration solutions have fundamentally transformed Soho House's financial operations, creating a scalable, efficient platform that supports their global growth ambitions. The combination of intelligent automation, seamless system connectivity, and advanced workflow management has positioned Soho House as a technology leader in the luxury hospitality sector. 

Through strategic partnership with ACS-APT, Soho House has achieved operational excellence while maintaining the flexibility to adapt rapidly to changing business requirements and expansion opportunities