How PPHE unlocked 50% of its AP processing team’s capacity & fueled growth with Rossum & KPMG

As an international hospitality leader, PPHE Hotel Group’s ambitious growth plans were challenged by a manual accounts payable process that couldn’t scale. The solution from Rossum and KPMG introduced intelligent automation, transforming the AP function to support their rapid expansion.

About PPHE

PPHE Hotel Group is an international hospitality real estate company, with a £2.2 billion portfolio of primarily prime freehold and long leasehold assets in Europe. Through its subsidiaries, jointly controlled entities and associates it owns, co-owns, develops, leases, operates and franchises hospitality real estate. Its portfolio includes full-service upscale, upper upscale and lifestyle hotels in major gateway cities and regional centres, as well as hotel, resort and campsite properties in select resort destinations.

The challenge: When AP is a bottleneck to growth

PPHE Hotel Group is a dynamic force in international hospitality, managing 51 properties across Europe under five distinct brands. With a clear vision for growth, the Group’s central Accounts Payable team in Leeds, processing over 12,500 invoices monthly, found its ambitions constrained by its technology.

Their existing template-based tool, integrated with their SunSystems accounting system, was buckling under the pressure. The challenges were significant and multifaceted:

• A system straining under ambition: Hosted on-premise, the legacy system struggled with increasing invoice volumes. Frequent slowdowns created frustrating delays for the AP team and business approvers alike, while the lack of integration with their Adaco PO system required slow, manual data uploads daily. Scaling to new properties was an IT-heavy, cumbersome process.
• The template trap: The system relied on rigid templates, leading to poor automation. UK entities plateaued at a mere 40% automation. For Dutch properties, with their unique language, decimal formats, and VAT rules, the rate was an unworkable 0%.
• Critical details lost in translation: The tool could only process header and footer data, completely missing line-item details. For a hospitality business with complex food and beverage invoices, this was a critical failure. All non-PO invoices required manual coding, and even minor price discrepancies on PO-based invoices had to be corrected by hand, a process known as “penny rounding.”
• Compromised financial integrity: The lack of automation forced the team into tedious manual supplier statement reconciliations. This not only consumed valuable time but also introduced errors and provided zero real-time visibility into the invoice lifecycle, impacting the accuracy of financial reporting and month-end accruals.

PPHE needed a solution that was not just functional, but intelligent, scalable, and capable of supporting its forward-looking strategy.

The solution with KPMG & Rossum

To address these challenges head-on, PPHE engaged KPMG to conduct a comprehensive strategic review of its entire finance organization. The process was methodical and targeted:

• Current state assessment: KPMG began by analyzing the core functions of Procure-to-Pay, Reserve-to-Cash, and Record-to-Report, mapping out the entire system landscape to pinpoint specific opportunities for standardization and digitization.
• P2P as the ripest function for automation: The highest-priority recommendation was for the P2P function. The legacy system had to be replaced with a modern intelligent document processing platform to enhance the intelligence of invoice matching.

This expert diagnosis and clear recommendation directly led to a proof of concept, and Rossum was selected as the ideal platform to deliver on this transformative vision. The joint solution immediately addressed PPHE’s biggest challenges and delivered value from day one:

• Achieving true scalability with 98% uptime: Moving to Rossum’s cloud platform instantly solved the scalability problem. PPHE eliminated server costs and IT maintenance burdens, gaining a reliable system that supports growth without limits.
• Unlocking automation across markets: Rossum’s AI engine requires no templates. It learns and adapts to any invoice format, language, or regional nuance. This value was proven as Dutch invoice automation jumped from 0% to 44%, and UK automation climbed to nearly 70%. Rossum is now being implemented for PPHE’s italian properties.
• Automating end-to-end line-item processing: Rossum captures every detail down to the line-item level. This capability eliminated the need for manual coding of non-PO items and automated the “penny rounding” adjustments, saving hundreds of hours of tedious work.
• Improving accuracy and reducing risk: With KPMG’s guidance, Rossum was configured to automatically validate vendor data like bank details, reducing fraud risk. It also enforces complex VAT rules to ensure ompliance and automates statement reconciliation to guarantee data quality for financial reporting.
• Ensuring seamless integration: Rossum replicated PPHE’s existing business logic from SunSystems, creating a seamless workflow with custom rules for approvals, exception handling, and even unique business cases like automatically parking invoices when goods had not yet been received.

“We are proud to have partnered with PPHE to transform their Accounts Payable process with Rossum AI. By combining our process optimization expertise with Rossum’s powerful, flexible platform, we delivered a tailored solution that perfectly aligned with PPHE’s processes.”

Sjoerd de Groot, Manager, Digital Process Excellence at KPMG.

The result: A 50% gain in AP team efficiency

The business impact was immediate and substantial. By automating low-value tasks, PPHE unlocked 50% of its AP processing team’s capacity.

The team now invests its time in strategic initiatives that directly benefit the business’s bottom line: optimizing supplier payments, performing in-depth financial analysis, and improving vendor relationships. The entire organization now operates with faster, more accurate financial data, enabling better decision-making from the ground up.

Other key figures:

• 97% average accuracy
• 75% touchless documents

What’s next for PPHE?

PPHE is now optimizing the solution to unlock even greater efficiencies. Future plans include:

• Fine-tuning regional customizations for broader automation coverage across properties.
• Expanding the use of Rossum’s master data tables to implement advanced logic and enhance approval workflows.
• Exploring the ingestion of e-invoices in other regions.