Smart Integration Saves Norway's De Bergenske 40-50 Hours of Accounting per Month

Problem: Time-consuming bookkeeping

De Bergenske is a traditional family business that today runs six hotels, ten restaurants and five other premises in the center of Bergen. For over 100 years, they have facilitated first-class accommodation and dining experiences for locals and visiting tourists at their unique and venerable locations in the Westland capital. The family business saw the light of day as early as 1919 and is currently experiencing solid growth. Several generations have helped drive the adventure forward, and in 2023 Eden Hotel will enter as a new green luxury alternative to the city’s tourism.

Controlling the accounts of the many different hotels and outlets of De Bergenske can naturally be quite resource-intensive. The popular hotel and restaurant chain previously struggled a lot with extracting settlement reports manually from the various points of sale, downloading and uploading figures, separating out fees and so on.

“For us, it is important that the bookkeeping work is as automated as possible. It allows us to work more analytically instead of having to sit and fiddle with looking for various reports and handling fees. Nobody thinks that’s particularly nice,” says Thomas Grønsberg, Finance Director at De Bergenske.

Solution: Received help developing a smart integration in order to simplify the everyday work

Thomas investigated the possibility of developing an integration between the payment solution they use, Nets Easy, and their accounting program, 24SevenOffice. He therefore contacted the Sandnes-based company iizy, which has extensive experience in developing special integrations between systems that do not normally “talk to each other”.

“Our goal is to simplify the everyday working life of our customers, so that they can concentrate more on their core business instead of spending time on manual punching across systems,” says Øyvind Bratlie, Sales and Marketing Manager at iizy. Iizy is a proud gazelle company for the fourth year in a row and offers a cloud-based software that transfers information efficiently and seamlessly between different systems. The company currently has integrations with over 200 different systems within invoicing and accounting.

“For De Bergenske, we have developed an integration between Nets Easy and 24SevenOffice that automates the reading of the settlement reports from Nets Easy, so that they get their accounts updated daily. The amounts that are recorded are the payment from customers, the costing of Nets Easy’s fees and the amount that Nets Easy pays out to the company’s bank account,” says Øyvind.

The skilled technicians who work at iizy only need a couple of working days to set up a fully functioning solution for other companies that want an integration between Nets Easy and their accounting system. Nets Easy has a so-called open API that is available on their website, and iizy are the country’s leading specialists in extracting data from Nets Easy and transforming it so that it turns into correct accounting documents.

“What we have done is to connect to Nets Easy via this API and created a “bridge” to 24SevenOffice, which is the accounting program for De Bergenske. We can now set up this bridge, or integration, for everyone who uses Nets Easy,” says Øyvind.

Results: De Bergenske saved around 40-50 hours every month on bookkeeping!

With heavy and time-consuming manual processes cleared out of the way with the help of the new integration, Thomas in De Bergenske estimates that they save around 40-50 hours every month on bookkeeping: “Full-fledged integrations linked to our financial system mean that we save enormous amounts of time and drastically simplify everyday work for the employees. The good people at iizy have really created a good solution for us.”

Øyvind at iizy also has no doubt that many companies would have benefited from automating their bookkeeping processes. He states that: De Bergenske now doesn’t have to spend many hours on bookkeeping per month, but can instead just check that everything is correct and click “ok” and “book”. If your company spends more than half an hour punching in figures manually a month in connection with the accounting work, it would be worthwhile to order an integration from us.

In conclusion, both brag about the Nets Easy payment solution and how easy it is to use.

“For us, it is very important that it should be easy for our customers to pay for their hotel stay online. Here, Nets Easy’s simple layout and appearance are brilliant. Our customers feel safe with the payment solution, and that is important to us,” concludes Thomas.