Restaurant365 gives Taco Bell franchisees the restaurant-specific accounting solutions that save time, eliminate manual tasks, reduce errors, and enables you to make real-time, data-driven decisions when opportunities and challenges arise.
Restaurant365 gives Taco Bell franchisees the restaurant-specific accounting solutions that save time, eliminate manual tasks, reduce errors, and enables you to make real-time, data-driven decisions when opportunities and challenges arise.
With more than 30 years in the franchising business, BLCO Enterprises has grown into managing 23 KFC/Taco Bell franchises throughout Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, proudly employing more than 700 team members. Sarah Ballard, Director of Finance and a Certified Public Accountant, explained that as BLCO Enterprises worked to streamline its accounting and operations across 29 locations and multiple divisions, the company realized that scaling its QuickBooks Desktop system created an extremely inefficient workflow.
Ballard began searching for a new accounting system to reduce the amount of data entry they were doing and to reduce the resources and time spent on our extensive number of invoices. Also on her wish list were consolidation, detailed reports, a fixed asset tracker, and an accounting solution that integrated smoothly with the POS system.
Ballard decided to try Restaurant365, an all-in-one, cloud-based platform built to help restaurant operators run their businesses more efficiently and profitably. Since BLCO Enterprises had recently acquired four restaurants in a standalone company that had yet to be folded into the main company, Ballard decided this was the perfect way to test R365. With the help of one of R365’s implementation specialists, Restaurant365 was up and running in all four restaurants in less than three weeks.
With the addition of R365’s robust accounting products, like bank reconciliation, as well as tools like fixed asset tracking, custom financial reporting, and full integration with POS systems, food and beverage vendors, and banks, Ballard estimates the team is already saving more than 50 hours a month and “anticipates that time savings to grow.”
Ballard added, “The intercompany benefit is worth it alone.” With multiple companies in Canada that do a lot of intercompany transfers, BLCO is now able to condense transfers into one entry, versus going in and out of multiple entities to ensure they’re all in balance at the end of the month and year.
“The intercompany is phenomenal,” she added. “Now, we just plug in which company we want it to go to per location, and R365 does it right automatically, “There’s no need to go back and rebalance, which is a huge time saver.” With Restaurant365 integrations throughout the entire company, BLCO can streamline reporting both by selecting the entities to include in a report using the same chart of accounts, and through consolidated forecasting.
Below are the main benefits of Intercompany accounting for fast-growing restaurant groups:
One of the major accounting issues restaurant groups face is the variety of reporting practices used by each legal entity under it. It is critical to standardize practices and policies that detail every step of your accounting process and how to collect, tag, and store transactional information. This will allow your accounting teams to organize and file your financial reports much more efficiently while lowering the risk of error.
Operators of dispersed restaurant companies must account for the differences between local laws that could make standardized policies too vague. However, intercompany reporting and management policies are much easier to enforce across the entire company.
Centralized document management is another essential aspect of intercompany accounting. In many cases, enterprises have their transaction documents, such as invoices, contracts, and purchase orders, isolated in different systems, making reconciliation discrepancies difficult to fix. A central repository for all intercompany records streamlines recordkeeping.
Using one database for intercompany bookkeeping and accounting data saves time and minimizes the potential for errors. An accounting system with a central database allows you to upload a long database spreadsheet into the system with one click rather than typing out thousands of lines of transactions. Finally, a centralized database facilitates streamlined reporting. Modern restaurant accounting software with one database for multiple locations allows reporting for 100 restaurants to be done in the same time it would take for one.
AP automation virtually eliminates time-consuming, error-prone data entry and allows your store managers to focus on customer service and front-of-house operations. Getting an invoice through a manual accounts payable system can be arduous. A manual data entry mistake can result in hours spent tracking down the error’s cause, and invoice errors can consume your restaurant’s profit margin. By virtually eliminating manual data entry and streamlining approval processes, AP automation can cut days off your monthly invoice processing time. Leveraging AP automation enables your accounting team to upload invoices from multiple locations to the cloud, process them, and approve them.
AP automation can also help verify vendor contract pricing. Vendor errors originating from suppliers’ invoices can be harder to manage than internal mistakes. Automated AP empowers you to track price fluctuation, enabling you to hold vendors accountable without requiring verification between accounting staff and store-level managers. With all invoices in a central system with accurate line-item details, you can also set variance alerts to gain insight into real-time food costs. Armed with this information, the operations team can act quickly to fix these errors without waiting on the accounting team for details.
For most accounting teams, reconciliation is the most dreaded part of the monthly financial close. Since reconciliations are often manual, involve multiple people, and can require thousands of reconciliations, the opportunity to reduce time and resource requirements is significant.
Automation fully integrates account reconciliation into the financial close and supports monitoring, reporting, and analysis. In addition to streamlining the process, an automated reconciliation also improves data security.
The challenge for restaurant groups is that most accounting software can’t handle multiple entities in a single database. This requires accounting teams to undertake the cumbersome task of manually inputting due to/from entries individually for each restaurant location. This time-consuming and error-prone process never ends and struggles to provide a clear snapshot of the business.
Restaurant365’s intercompany visibility enables inter-store transactions, invoice sharing, and real-time cost and labor analysis with just a few clicks. When asked about her experience with the Restaurant365 team, Ballard said, “Our success has been foremost in their minds. It’s just been a fantastic experience and I would love to share that with as many people as I can.”
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