How Toast’s integration with MEWS Property Management System helps the Wythe Hotel save hours reconciling room charges each week

In 2019, Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel made the jump to Toast because they were eager to adopt a cutting-edge point-of-sale (POS) platform that could seamlessly connect front- and back-of-house operations across their three food and beverage concepts. And earlier this year, Wythe became one of the first hotels to leverage Toast’s new integration with MEWS Property Management System (PMS), powered by OmniBoost, to streamline their nightly room-charge reconciliation process.

Wythe Hotel is a historic factory building turned 69-room boutique hotel in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. With three food and beverage outlets serving both hotel guests and local Brooklynites alike, Wythe is a bustling operation. Le Crocodile is a full-service neighborhood brasserie located on the ground floor that serves French fare in a comfortable yet sophisticated atmosphere. Bar Blondeau is their sixth-floor rooftop bar with sweeping views of Manhattan and a seafood-forward menu that complements a robust wine list and signature cocktails. Wythe also has a large event business that hosts everything from weddings and charity events to business gatherings.

“We want our guests – no matter where they are in the building, whether having drinks at the bar, dining in the restaurant, attending an event, or staying in the hotel – to encounter the same ‘Wythe flavor’ of hospitality,” said Charlie Smith, Director of Operations. “As a key element of our operational structure, Toast plays a big role in our ability to provide a unified guest experience across our property.”

In addition to helping Wythe deliver on their high-bar for hospitality, Toast has also allowed Wythe to streamline their operations in both the front and back of the house. For Pamela, Toast’s detailed and intuitive reporting has made her accounting responsibilities easier and more efficient.

“Toast is pretty intuitive and easy to navigate on the back end. Reporting and grabbing data is very user-friendly and I can usually find exactly the data I’m looking for with a few clicks. In the past, we had to use a third-party service to get any decent reporting out of our legacy systems,” said Pamela Stubbs, Wythe’s Controller.

For the front of the house, the quick-edit function is key to making menu edits on the fly so staff always knows if anything has been eighty-sixed. Wythe uses Toast Go® 2 handhelds at the front desk to handle room service orders, so that the front desk staff can fire orders directly to the kitchen without leaving their station. They also recently added more handhelds for the summer months in order to speed up the payment process at their bustling rooftop bar during the peak season.

Until recently, Wythe Hotel had to rely on a manual process to reconcile room charges between Toast POS and their MEWS PMS, so they were thrilled when they were able to integrate Toast with MEWS. Powered by middleware provider, OmniBoost, the integration allows room charges to be sent directly to MEWS in real-time, with item-level information so the front desk can see the specific details of each room charge if needed. 

Prior to this integration, the porter would collect paper receipts from room charges and bring them to the front desk each night to manually enter into the PMS. The accounting department then would have to run reports in both systems to compare balances and ensure that everything summed up properly. 

“With the old process, if everything was running smoothly it would take me about 20 minutes a day to reconcile the room charges, but when I had to track down missing receipts or dig into reports to find out where the variances were coming from, it could easily take up to 45 minutes a day,” said Pamela Stubbs.

These 20–45 minutes a day added up to hours each week for Pamela and her small accounting team, who had a lot of other things on their plate, but thanks to the purpose-built integration, she was able to reduce her team’s involvement in the reconciliation process.

“Before, it was really an accounting job to reconcile things on a nightly basis, but the integration has allowed me to hand off the reconciliation process to our night auditor, who is able to review everything in just a few minutes when things are slower. The fact that the data goes straight to MEWS now takes out a lot of the human error and has been a huge benefit for me and my team,” said Pamela.

Thanks to the integration, Pamela and her team are saving hours each week – time that can be spent on more holistic accounting needs for the business. “We’re so happy that Toast has worked with us to find a better way to run the reconciliation process,” Pamela said. “And we’re looking forward to continued time savings this integration will provide.”