When Alex Clark sat down with Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney for the latest episode of Behind the Numbers, recorded live at the National Restaurant Association show in 2026, she came armed with the one statistic every finance leader dreams of having at her fingertips: 1,388,759. That is the number of biscuits The Big Biscuit sold last year, and the fact that Clark could produce it (with a quick assist from her IT team) says everything about how she runs a finance function.
Clark is the VP of Finance at The Big Biscuit, a breakfast and lunch concept built across the Midwest. The footprint today spans Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, with Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Fayetteville among the markets, and four more stores coming out of the ground over the next six months. The brand carries 23 corporate locations and eight franchisees, and Clark is steering the financial systems behind that growth.
Asked what an operator should think about every single day, Clark started where the numbers start: data capture. Restaurants pull revenue from multiple sales channels, and some of those channels do not integrate cleanly with the POS. Her advice is to make sure every sale gets entered, that the POS buttons are mapped to the correct revenue centers, and that the information lands in a platform where it can be measured, evaluated, segmented, and acted on. Inventory has to be taken in the system. Labor has to be scheduled and managed somewhere you can review it. Only then can you answer the questions that drive profitability: What are my sales per server? Did I come in over or under my scheduled hours?
That theme came back repeatedly: a single source of truth. For The Big Biscuit, that source is Restaurant365.
Clark has nine years of experience with Restaurant365 across four implementations, and she has watched the back office shrink as automation took over the manual work. Before the platform, her teams entered food invoices by hand and keyed in sales manually. Now that data flows in automatically, and with OCR running for accounts payable, the manual load has dropped sharply.
The headcount math tells the story. The accounting department once ran four people dedicated solely to accounts payable. Today, one person splits her time between AP and other higher-value work. Clark described another team member whose entire job had been reconciling cash from the POS to the bank, a task that disappeared once the system took it over. She framed AP entry as a necessary evil that consumed time without adding much benefit, and removing it freed her people to do more across the office.
Clark referenced moving from a two-location environment at Jefferson’s to a 24-location operation, and she credited the platform for making that jump manageable. The hardest part, she joked, was memorizing the new store numbers and names. She also recalled why she first adopted Restaurant365 years ago at Jefferson’s: it was one of the only systems that would integrate with her POS at the time, which pulled her out of a fully manual process.
One of the sharper points in the conversation was Clark’s take on data quality. Stack a margin of error on a margin of error on a margin of error, she explained, and those errors combine into something material. The result can push you toward a decision you should not be making, built on data that was only ever “good enough” to begin with. Her standard is tighter than that, because the cost of compounding small inaccuracies shows up in real decisions.
The episode’s most concrete numbers discussion came when Clark walked through a pricing decision on a holiday limited-time offer: a cinnamon chip pancake. The premium chip drove up the actual cost of the menu item. The team first tried reducing the ounces to manage the cost, but that compromised the quality, so they reversed course.
Instead, they pulled the max, min, and average for the pancake section and decided that placing the item at the lower end of the margin (the higher end of the food cost) still kept them inside an acceptable range. The item would not skew far enough to be unmeasurable against their universal food cost target. In Clark’s words, they compromised with the guest and met them halfway: hit the margin they needed while keeping the dish good enough that guests would come back for it. The broader principle she drew out is that more data gives a finance team the confidence to take a calculated risk on a lower-margin item, because they can see how the single decision fits the whole.
The Big Biscuit builds all of this into a menu item analysis. The team exports data from the system into a flexible model where they can enter pricing, run what-if scenarios, and extrapolate a sales mix to project overall food cost percentage. That feeds budgeting, benchmarking, and bonus structures, so the targets operators are held to are grounded rather than arbitrary.
Clark talked about keeping a team “relevant in the system,” meaning everything entered has a real application and a reason behind it. She connects the data work directly to operator self-interest: if you do not enter inventory correctly, your food cost will be wrong, and you can lose your bonus. That makes the process personal. The same logic applies to labor, an area where The Big Biscuit is heavily focused on optimization. The line is built to be efficient, and the only way to know whether labor is staying lean is to measure it against sales in real time, including comparing two locations running the same line and the same number of people but landing on different labor costs.
Because the brand has already built out its labor matrices and inventory in the system, a new franchisee comes into a setup that is ready to go. With forecasted sales entered, an operator can pull PO suggestions for what to buy and know how many people they need on the floor by hour and by position. Clark sees that as making The Big Biscuit a better franchisor, handing new operators a blueprint rather than letting them fly blind.
Clark’s implementation journey at The Big Biscuit began in August 2025. Looking forward, she is adding more to the stack, including the hiring platform and an Alliance Payroll piece, on top of ExpandShare, which she is already using for scheduling, labor matrices, and training. She also flagged the economy as a watch item: if conditions stay rough, diners shift down a segment, and a breakfast and lunch concept has to work to hold its segment in place. Her approach is to start from where the brand wants to end up and work backward to what needs to happen today.
On her hot take, Clark pointed to AI as the industry’s likely game changer, with a caveat. Used well, it makes everything better. Used carelessly, it risks dehumanizing hospitality and pulling guests away from the experience they came for. Her position is that operators have to be responsible about keeping the human connection intact.
The Big Biscuit is approaching 30 locations across Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, with more on the way. You can find Alex Clark on LinkedIn.
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