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 (http://www.vitruvianllc.com/Evention/Default.aspx), a software solution that automates this process, at the upcoming HITEC 2008 hospitality tradeshow (http://www.hftp.org/content.cfm?pgid=2906) 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.

(PRWEB) April 22, 2008 -- 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 (http://www.vitruvianllc.com/Evention/Default.aspx), a software solution that automates this process, at the upcoming HITEC 2008 hospitality tradeshow (http://www.hftp.org/content.cfm?pgid=2906) 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 Evention, 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 (http://microsoft.mrmpslc.com/SqlServerFrontRunner/) for Evention.

For more information, visit us at our website, http://www.vitruvianllc.com/Evention.

###