The Austrian Hotel and Restaurant Panel
5.3 The Basic AHRP Data Entry and Reporting System on the Web
the classification scheme has been kept unchanged since the beginning of the AHRP project. The first reason is to maintain continuity in the reporting.
One important aspect,appreciated not only by interested (or participating) companies,but also by industry representatives,is the possibility of gaining a certain understanding of industry trends by comparing time series. Some investigation of time series of key ratios has been done for specific strategic groups within the industry. Secondly,budgetary restrictions on the project did not allow for the work of preparing new schemes,implementing these and revising editing and reporting programs to accommodate the changes.
The definitions of the strategic groups outlined in the AHRP,and regularly analysed and reported by Wöber (1994–2000), are listed in Table 5.4.
5.3 The Basic AHRP Data Entry and Reporting System
perspective researchers will have to allow themselves to be asked: Are manag- ers getting the information they need? The decision process in the field of financial management involves the analysis of a large volume of data and information (Brignall and Ballantine,1996: 23). Therefore,the need to access large databases and perform computations in real time is vital. This need has led researchers to implement decision support systems in various fields of financial management,such as financial planning,financial analysis and portfolio management. An extensive review of the literature on this subject was recently performed by Zopounidis et al. (1997). However,not a single reference of their 93 entries identifies a publication concerning a financial benchmarking system.
To foster meeting the increased information needs by Austrian hotel and restaurant entrepreneurs it was necessary for the AHRP to make use of the most promising communication instrument available today,the Internet.
Since 1995,all findings in the annual report have been published on the Internet. In 1999,the Internet presentation was completely revised and an interactive system with direct database access was introduced by the author.
This system was integrated into the Tourism Marketing Information System TourMIS9 which is an Extranet10 application developed by the Austrian National Tourist Office and the Austrian Society for Applied Research in Tourism with the objective of assisting tourism managers with market research and interactive decision support tools.
The AHRP site within TourMIS consists of a data entry section and a retrieval section. These are available for active and passive participants alike (Fig. 5.3). It should be noted that the system is accessible to all Austrian hotel and restaurant managers,including those who do not contribute to the survey.
5.3.1 Data entry
Each entrepreneur who wants to participate at the AHRP and is interested in using the Internet for data entry and reporting has to get an account within TourMIS. TourMIS offers all features of a user database that are necessary when assigning a personal account to each entrepreneur entering the system. These features include an online registration of users,an automatic assignment of a password via e-mail and the editing and deleting of his/her account.
After the entrepreneur’s registration he enters his basic business data to the AHRP site and receives a company number which will be needed later for editing and in order to perform analyses. User identification,password and company number offer enough security for the participants. This is necessary
9 See tourmis.wu-wien.ac.at
10 For a comparison of Extranet applications in tourism see Marcussen (1998).
to guarantee the level of privacy someone expects when he hands in his financial information to AHRP.
Once the manager has entered his basic business data,which is static information and unlikely to change over the years (e.g. the company’s address, location and type of operations),he/she can start entering financial data from the gain and loss statement and the balance sheet as well as the additional business data from the general questionnaire. Consistency checks during the storing phase (e.g. sum checks for the financial information) ensure that typing mistakes are avoided and the number of missing values are kept at a minimum. Financial data for multiple consecutive years can be entered into the system.
Although an entrepreneur may be deluged with printouts,reports and statistics from TourMIS,he or she may not necessarily be receiving the right kinds of information needed to plan and or manage his firm. For this reason, TourMIS has advanced protocol features in addition to the Web server’s standard protocols,which allow the assessment of all inquiries and actions taken by the user. Assessment protocols linked to other protocols offered by TourMIS have been found to be a very valuable tool for learning the Fig. 5.3. Homepage of AHRP.
entrepreneurs’ requirements and for the continuing development of the system (Wöber, 1998).
5.3.2 Data retrieval and analysis
Data entered by the user may pass all consistency checks during the data entry phase,but still be subject to errors. Although the compulsory identification and the built-in consistency checks support the avoidance of faked entries,this cannot be completely prevented due to the open system architecture. This characteristic of every interactive database application on the Web makes real-time analyses with a pooled data set difficult,as data for analysis may still be corrupt. In order to avoid this problem in the AHRP database the entrepre- neur’s business data are not directly saved to the general database,but first saved to a temporary database for all new entries. Periodically the system administrator checks each individual record in the temporary database and decides whether the record is a serious contribution to the project. Records accepted are moved to the general database and others are deleted. Whenever a manager of a company with an unproved data record requires the con- sideration of several companies for comparative analyses,the analyses are performed on the general database plus exactly one record (the record from the company under evaluation) from the temporary database. This procedure guarantees the integrity of the AHRP database and at the same time allows all conceivable procedures for the optimal selection of comparison partners.
5.3.3 The AHRP reporting functions
The system’s basic retrieval and reporting functions offer the calculation of financial key ratios for each individual company plus the calculation of means, medians,maximum/minimum values and standard deviations for all strategic groups listed in Table 5.4. The reporting is organized by preformatted tables, which are generated on request by means of CGI scripts and an Xbase compati- ble database.11
The principal reports available within AHRP include:
1. The calculation of financial key ratios for one specific strategic group/
industry sector;
2. The comparison of one specific financial key ratio for all strategic groups/
industry sectors;
3. The development of a specific financial key ratio in all strategic groups/
industry sectors;
11 The program was developed in PERL and uses the Xbase – Perl module written by Pratap Pereira.
4. The development of all financial key ratios for a specific company over several consecutive fiscal years; and
5. The comparison of an individual company’s financial key ratios with a specific strategic group/industry sector.
Reports 1 to 3 are general reports also available to non-participating hotel and restaurant managers or other interested parties accessing the system.12The tables generated by reports 4 and 5 require active participation by entering individual company data. Report 5 provides the simplest form of evaluation which in most hospitality industry reports is referred to as ‘benchmarks’ of industry performance (e.g. Bottomley,1995; Horwath International,1998;
Pannell Kerr Foster, 1998).
5.3.4 Financial key ratios in the AHRP
When planning to open a new hotel or restaurant or measuring the per- formance of an existing one,certain essential relationships between various quantities are to be expected (Kotas and Kreul,1987). One expects a certain relationship between the investment in assets and net profit,between net sales and net profit,between rooms available and rooms occupied,and so on. All such relationships may be expressed by ratios. There are numerous financial ratios that are commonly used by hotel managers to monitor business per- formance. In the AHRP study,32 key financial ratios were calculated. These fall into four groups:
1. Ratios describing the operational performance in a specific fiscal year (derived from the gain and loss statement);
2. Ratios describing the financial situation of the company (derived from the balance sheet);
3. Ratios describing the employee’s productivity; and 4. Ratios describing other characteristics of the company.