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Restaurant financials – a clear view


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You’re at the helm of a thriving restaurant chain. You’ve grown your business from that urban small plates restaurant to five ten or so restaurant locations in three counties and two states, complete with a distribution warehouse. Congrats! Why? Because, where most businesses usually have either a great product or service, you have both. Maybe it was your idea of street tacos that hatched Six Degrees of Tacos? Or, maybe that slider joint you dreamed about actually became a reality. Whatever the culinary service dream, you’re living it.

Now, your biggest concerns revolve around growing and maintaining your increasingly complex operation. At first, reliance on QuickBooks was more than enough to track everything when you had that one restaurant. Perhaps you were able to get by without too much difficulty when you expanded and added your first two locations. But now, your restaurant chain is a whole new beast, and you’re pushing through growing pains of an expanding business. What about your restaurant financials?

Is your restaurant chain . . .

  • struggling to produce solid reports based on reliable, accurate data?

  • taking longer to produce standard (revenue forecasts, profit and loss), periodic (weekly, monthly, quarterly) reports?

  • accurately tracking and calculating vendor and maintenance expenses from one location to another?

  • Struggling to track inventory and shipments (direct from vendor to restaurant, or from warehouse to restaurant)?

If any of those scenarios sound familiar, then you’re spending too much time trying to catch up with operations, when you should be thinking of the next best way to serve up what Yelp reviews are calling ‘delicious farm to table’. Maybe it’s time to embrace an upgrade to a proactive system that grows with you. Built on the Microsoft Power Platform (aka Dynamics 365, Gravity Software® (Gravity) provides a tailored adaptation for your restaurant chain with a clear, 360-degree view of every location, anytime.

Gravity Software 10 key ideas for improving your accounting practice

How accurate is your data?

You’ve heard this before: the numbers don’t lie. Your business is only as healthy and sound as what your data can prove. For each restaurant, you or your on-site general manager, are making important decisions that affect the value of each locale. Of course, those decisions are based on the data in front of you. With accurate data, you’re increasing the restaurant’s (and the company’s) net worth and overall return, and everyone’s happy.

Consolidation – not a problem

If you’re still relying on QuickBooks are you having to log in to each databases for each location? What if you could have all your legal entities on one database? When your company’s data is consolidated in one accessible location, you can (with proper security features in place) navigate from one location to the next without wasting precious time.

Gravity can really go to work by…

  • drilling down and extracting any/all relevant data, for any location/ entity.

  • sharing master files. With proper security features in place, you can share with all of your locations’ general managers, but perhaps not their assistant GM’s.

  • reporting on consolidated information. Track and breakdown vendor expenses by location. Now you can compare one location to another, side by side, without embarking from one information silo to another. Go ahead, see which location is going through more inventory in the same amount of time.

  • capturing and analyzing critical data, like overhead expenses by location. Which restaurant spent money fixing line equipment? Who installed new booths? Who spent a little more on product last month because of those special catered events?

Satisfy everyone’s appetites

Imagine you partnered up with an investor or three (A, B and C), and you have produce regular, routine reports for them. With all of your restaurant locations’ data on one platform, you’ll have all the information available to produce any desired report. Gravity’s Advanced Financial Statements allows you to produce the reports the way you want in a matter of minutes, not days. Viola!

Even if Investor A throws an unexpected request out of nowhere, you’re covered. Suppose she needs a side by side vendor comparison, to see how much you’re saving (or losing) by going with a new meat provider. And she also wants to see how much you’re spending on alcohol spirits and beer for the past three summers (June through August). Requests received, no worries. You’re not sweating it because you’re able to drill down, extract the data and generate those specific, customized reports in no time.

Gravity can centralize the operations for your multiple restaurant locations into one database while still providing detailed and customized reporting for each locale. Contact Us to Schedule a Demo today. My business is connected. Is yours?

Gravity Software

Better. Smarter. Accounting.

 
 
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