When Kristen Sandhurst joined Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney on Behind the Numbers, she brought a perspective that few guests can match. As a partner at Edotto and CFO of the affiliated franchise group operating 20 Taco John’s and 3 Slim Chickens locations, Kristen sits on both sides of the restaurant equation: the operator chasing top-line sales and the CPA reading every line of the P&L. Her family business has been in restaurants for over 50 years, with her dad working with the franchise group for 31 of them.
The conversation moved through technology adoption, AI in accounting, the discipline of inventory, and why human hospitality still wins. Here are the takeaways that should matter to any operator or accountant trying to make sense of the numbers right now.
Asked what restaurant operators should be focused on day to day, Kristen did not hesitate. With consumer spending under pressure and traffic counts in decline, the entire focus inside her group is top-line sales. She rephrased an old saying for the moment: sales cover a multitude of sins. When sales are growing, labor and food cost ratios get easier to manage. When sales are stagnant or shrinking, every other line on the P&L starts to feel heavier.
For context on what is possible, the group discussed the highest-volume Chick-fil-A in the country, reportedly in the Miami area, doing $20 million in sales on six days a week. That works out to roughly $64,000 per day with Sundays off. By comparison, when Kristen’s first Slim Chickens opened, day one came in at almost $26,000 in sales, and her team thought they were not going to make it through. The Chick-fil-A benchmark is roughly two and a half times that volume, every single operating day.
Kristen shared the benchmarks her team uses when reading client P&Ls. Prime cost (cost of goods plus labor) needs to come in under 60% if the operation has any real chance of making money on the bottom line. Supplies should run at 1.25% of sales or better. Repairs and maintenance should sit under 2% in newer buildings, and 2 to 3% is normal for middle-aged buildings. These are the numbers her father started benchmarking years ago across the Taco John’s portfolio, and the same discipline now informs her work with Slim Chickens and outside accounting clients.
The discipline only works if the chart of accounts is built to surface this information. Kristen took aim at one common practice: alphabetizing the controllable section of the P&L. When maintenance lives under M and repairs lives under R, an HVAC visit that involves both becomes an accounting puzzle for the bookkeeper and unreadable for the operator. Group those into a single repairs and maintenance section, and the data becomes information an operator can actually use.
The first outside client Edotto took on was an ice cream shop in Sioux Falls run by a contact from a chamber of commerce networking group years earlier. The operator had never taken inventory. Kristen and her team walked the store, mapped every SKU, established pack sizes, and got the staff counting on a regular cadence.
In the first year of working together, that client improved cost of goods by 300 basis points. The wins came from awareness, accountability, portion work, and from people knowing someone was watching the numbers. Kristen’s framing on this was direct: if you are not counting inventory, your cost of goods becomes a roller coaster driven entirely by the timing of purchases, which is not useful to anyone.
She also made the case for getting the actual count in place even before recipes and theoretical usage are built out. The actual gives operators a true journey of what came in, what got used, and what is missing. Theoretical helps explain why. Both matter, but the actual is the foundation.
Asked where restaurants lose money without realizing it, Kristen pointed at food cost first and water bills second. On the food side, the leaks are everywhere: fries handed out the drive-thru window, mistakes thrown in the garbage, items overproduced, portion sizes drifting upward. Without inventory counts and waste tracking, that loss is invisible until the P&L shows up.
The water bill story was a concrete example of how good accounting catches operational issues. At one Slim Chickens location, an unusually high water bill led the accounting team to ask the GM what was happening. A toilet had been running. At another location, the team kept turning on the power soak sink and forgetting about it, letting it overflow three times in a single month. Neither problem would have surfaced from operations alone. The financials caught them.
Kristen’s AI journey started a couple of years ago at the R365 conference in Nashville, after a speaker told the audience to start by using AI for legal drafting. She did exactly that, asking it to draft a two-page catering agreement for a local high school concession deal.
From there it expanded into reconciliations, building automations with a tool called n8n, and using ChatGPT and Claude to learn the underlying concepts (starting with the basics, like asking what an API actually is).
The breakthrough she described was Claude’s Co-Worker capability on Windows, which lets the AI work directly in a folder rather than within the limits of an upload window. She had 70 scanned PDF files that needed to be logged into a spreadsheet. Co-Worker opened them one by one in the background, pulled the data, and logged each one. As she put it, nobody wanted to do that job in the first place.
She also built a Chrome extension using Claude to make Sage Intacct’s user interface tolerable for one of her clients. The extension auto-checks boxes on the pay bills screen when she pastes in a list of invoice numbers. She does not write code. She described what she needed, iterated when the output did not work, and ended up with a working tool she can hand off to her team.
The frame she and the hosts kept returning to: AI is task replacement, not job replacement. The output goes up, the input goes down, and nobody on the team is stuck doing the manual work nobody wanted in the first place.
Kristen’s group tested AI in the drive-thru at both concepts, with two different providers. The technology itself was excellent. Customers hated it. Staff hated it too, partly because they enjoyed interacting with regular guests, and partly because the order injection timing was slower than a human listening on a headset and punching the order in directly. The team’s working philosophy now: use AI in the back of house and in the office, keep human interaction at the front of house.
The same logic applies to kiosks. Kristen has them in some of her restaurants and likes them, but she insists a person stay out front. Otherwise the customer who needs an extra ranch ends up hollering back into the kitchen, which is not the experience anyone wants to deliver.
Kristen closed with a line from the first day of accounting class. Data is data. Information is data with meaning attached to it. The goal of accounting is to make information useful to the end user. That is why Edotto starts every new client engagement by reorganizing the chart of accounts around what actually matters to that specific operator. An ice cream shop’s P&L should not look like a chicken concept’s P&L. The categories have to mean something to the person making decisions, or the financials become a backward-looking exercise that helps no one.
For an industry that often treats accounting as a compliance function, the Edotto approach is a reminder that the numbers are an operating tool first. Get the chart of accounts right, count the inventory, watch the benchmarks, and use AI to take the manual work off your team’s plate. The bottom line takes care of itself when the foundation is solid.
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