Every morning at SERVE Hospitality Group, the finance team starts the same way. They code the bank activity for each entity, line up every deposit against its cafe’s daily sales, and flag anything off by more than $10. By the end of the day, a short deposit is usually a solved problem instead of a surprise at month-end.
It’s a small routine, but it says a lot about how this Tropical Smoothie Cafe franchisee runs its business. SERVE now operates 40 cafes across Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, with about 700 team members and more than 20 new sites in the pipeline.
When SERVE’s CPA-trained leaders, including owner and CEO Salem Najjar, went live on Restaurant365 in 2020, they weren’t shopping for a system to fit the business they had. They wanted one built for restaurant accounting that would still work as the business grew.
Growth was exciting at SERVE, but behind the scenes it was getting harder to keep up with.
Every new cafe meant more numbers to track, and the accounting team was struggling to turn those numbers into financials leaders could trust. Reports came late and didn’t always add up. When a decision was on the table, whether to expand, change course, or hold steady, leaders couldn’t always be sure the data in front of them was right.
Even the everyday work took too much time. Moving money between entities meant tracking each transfer by hand, and it ate up hours the team needed for more valuable work. Worse, the manual process left errors behind, so reporting by location wasn’t correct. If you can’t trust the numbers for each cafe, you can’t tell which ones are thriving and which ones need help.
Then there was the money going out the door without anyone seeing it. With no clear view of daily sales and undeposited funds, SERVE had no easy way to catch a missing deposit or a possible case of theft. By the time a problem showed up, it was often too late to trace. Across many cafes, those misses added up to thousands of dollars.
Opening a new cafe added more strain. Setting up a new accounting record, GL accounts, and bank accounts took hours, and leaders worried about how long it would take before they could even tell whether a new location was performing. Every cafe they added brought more work, and the business couldn’t afford for that to keep growing at the same pace.
SERVE set up R365 Accounting across its enterprise, along with its chart of accounts and its POS and bank connections. Within two to three months, it was up and running.
Today, R365 is where the whole operation comes together. PAR Brink POS sends in daily sales for every cafe, and the banks send in daily transactions. Invoices from vendors like Produce Alliance and Sysco flow in on their own through AP automation. Rippling payroll journals arrive by location. DeliverSense, Expensify, and Ecotrak fill in delivery, credit card, and repair costs.
Even the paperwork has gotten easier. R365’s AI-powered invoice coding reads invoices and receipts and codes them automatically, which has cut back on a lot of manual data entry. And when a transfer happens between entities, R365 records both sides automatically, so month-end reconciliation is a routine step and not a clean-up project.
Without R365, every new cafe would mean more spreadsheets, more people and less visibility. Instead, it’s the hub where our POS, bank, payroll and vendor data come together, so a new cafe adds volume, not complexity.
Salem Najjar, Owner & CEO
Serve hospitality group
Adding a location is now one of the easiest parts of growing. The team copies the setup of an existing cafe, connects the new bank accounts, and asks R365 to complete the POS connection. From its very first day, the new cafe reports sales and cash like all the others.
That ease fits with the way SERVE opens cafes overall. What used to feel like a one-off project is now a repeatable process run by SERVE’s own team, who handle real estate, development, legal, accounting, HR, and marketing in-house. They review sales projections and cannibalization studies before choosing a site, then follow a standard playbook from lease to grand opening. Acquisitions follow the same steps for lease and accounting setup.
SERVE’s finance and accounting team has five people, and each one focuses on a specific area, such as daily sales and cash, payables, payroll accounting, sales tax, and financial reporting. Together they support every cafe.
The results show up in the numbers. SERVE now closes its books within four days after each operating period, down from 10 to 15 days in its earlier years on R365. That’s a cut of more than half. With faster books, the team reviews Prime Cost for every cafe each month, looking at food cost monthly and labor with each biweekly payroll. They catch food and labor trends early, while there’s still time to fix them.
The data also helps with the bigger calls. SERVE uses it to decide which discounts and promotions are worth keeping, which vendors and subscriptions cost too much, and how to bring down recurring costs like third-party delivery fees.
SERVE estimates it has saved more than $145,000 by growing without adding accounting staff at the same pace. And with the systems it has in place, SERVE believes it could support roughly twice as many cafes by adding only one or two people.
With more than 20 new sites in development and acquisitions on the radar, SERVE isn’t slowing down. And with R365, it doesn’t have to worry that growth will make things harder.
“We close the books in four days, catch deposit issues within a day, and have grown to 40 cafes with a lean accounting team,” said Najjar. “That’s what lets us keep growing with confidence.”
Back at SERVE, the morning routine hasn’t changed. Bank activity gets coded, deposits get matched to daily sales, and anything off by more than $10 gets flagged before the day is out. What has changed is the size of the business around it.
SERVE now runs 40 Tropical Smoothie Cafe locations across Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, with more than 20 sites in the pipeline. The books close in four days. New cafes join the system in minutes. And the same five-person finance team keeps every location in view.
That’s what the SERVE team set out to build when they chose Restaurant365. They wanted one place where the numbers come together, so the next cafe adds volume and not complexity.
To see how Restaurant365 can support your own growth, request a demo.
4 days
to close the books each operating period
$145,000+
in estimated savings
1 day
to catch and fix a missing or short deposit
Discover how you can start achieving savings like these for your business
Restaurant365 brings together accounting, operations, scheduling, and more in a flexible platform—empowering restaurants to choose the solutions they need and scale with confidence.
