M3, the leading cloud-based financial platform for the hospitality industry, is marking its 20th anniversary with new milestones and continued momentum for 2019 and beyond. Used by over half of the top hotel companies in the U.S., M3 is the No. 1 accounting solution for hoteliers, serving 12,000 users at more than 5,500 hotels around the world.

"From the largest hospitality brands to boutique hotel properties, every aspect of M3 has been carefully designed, developed and deployed to make a hotelier's life easier since day one," said John McKibbon, CEO of M3. "Over the next 20 years, we will continue to transform the industry with new solutions that drive financial performance for hotels across the globe."

A History of Innovation
Decades ago, John McKibbon had a vision to move the hotel industry into the digital age. Combining his experience in hotel accounting with computer programming, McKibbon developed M3's first hotel accounting system in 1985. With the advent of the Internet, M3 became industry pioneers by utilizing cloud computing and launched its Accounting Core product in 1998. Through groundbreaking technological advancements and superior customer support, M3 achieved rapid growth over the past two decades, even during some of the most tumultuous economic cycles in recent history. M3 diligently balances its steadfast commitment to customer satisfaction with consistent business growth. Today, the company boasts a customer retention rating of 98 percent and does so without issuing contracts or agreements. Scott Watson, M3's Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing, attributes this amazing retention statistic to the three pillars of M3.

"We earn our customers' business every day – we have to," said Watson. "There are no contracts or agreements at M3 forcing customers to stay. We have not increased the price of the accounting solution since it was introduced in 1998. And, we always do the right thing."

New Milestones + International Expansion 
In 2018, M3 experienced unprecedented historical growth. To meet the demands of the company's growing teams, M3 opened new offices in Gwinnett, Ga., and Tampa, Fla.

"Our new offices embody M3's commitment to relentless innovation," Allen Read, president and partner of M3. "The new spaces better enable us to answer the ever-changing needs of the hospitality industry while providing our teams with a collaborative work environment to attract new talent from Atlanta and Tampa's growing tech sectors."

Earlier this year, the tech pioneer welcomed its 5,000th property to adopt Accounting Core, M3's entry-point solution and the most powerful and widely used hotel-specific accounting software.

This year M3 also welcomed its first hotel group outside of the U.S. through a special partnership with Scotland-based French Duncan. Unlike other solutions in the European market, M3 offers automated mapping of PMS data to daily reports as well as easily consolidated financials and actionable, real-time insights via mobile device which allows hoteliers and management companies to make informed decisions on the fly – from anywhere in the world. M3 also expanded to the north by welcoming Genesis Hospitality. Genesis is based in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, and is M3's first multi-property portfolio that is Canadian-owned, headquartered and operated.

Customer-Centric Focus
M3 reinvests more than 25 percent of its revenue back into its technology and is currently rolling out several new solutions for its users. Built by hoteliers, exclusively for hoteliers, M3 continues its investment in its customers. "Reinvesting in the success of our customers is paramount," said Casi Johnson, M3's Chief Operations Officer and Innovations Leader. "Our development strategy is simply to make our customers' lives easier by giving them what they want and staying one-step ahead of their needs." According to Johnson, M3 has several key products that will be released in the coming months:

M3's 20^th anniversary is also marked by the introduction of its new Business Intelligence Platform, which features user-driven, interactive dashboards, mobile compatibility, ad hoc reporting and robust analytics – all designed from the perspective of the end user, whether that be an operator, owner or asset manager. From single-location properties to entire hotel portfolios, the platform will deliver a powerful and intuitive user experience and will provide actionable data in real time. M3's new deliverable, Insight, is a cutting-edge solution that will take hotel data and analytical reporting into the next decade and beyond.

The company's Intelligent Imaging Platform is designed to streamline data entry and improve workflows. For years, M3's Accounting Core platform has had the capability to imbed digital images into the system for easy retrieval from within financial statements and other modules. This has eliminated the need for their customers to mail invoices and store hard-copy documents. The addition of Intelligent Imaging removes much of the manual process of data input as invoice data will be scanned, apportioned and stored via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when the document is scanned.

M3 will soon debut its new API-accessible Data Warehouse, which is optimized to store and combine data in a meaningful way so that hoteliers can make better decisions related to balance sheets, occupancy rates and asset performance. Using reliable APIs, the new data storage system will seamlessly integrate with third-party vendors to transport data quickly from one point to another, removing the need for manual transport.