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3 Brothers Restaurants has operated as a Del Taco franchisee since 2009, growing over the years to roughly 40 locations across Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. CFO Jay Hartman joined in 2023, after ownership sensed that something in the back office wasn’t working. Stores kept asking for more headcount, but leadership couldn’t tell whether the issue was staffing or process.
Hartman’s mandate was broad: Evaluate the accounting systems and workflows across every business line and consolidate them into something more efficient.
“I feel like everybody always says they’re too busy,” Hartman recalls being told when he came on board, “but something isn’t clicking.”
The restaurant business was running on Sage, a general ledger system that the existing team had used for years. However, the software had no real path to the integrations a multi-brand QSR operation needed. In other words, no way to pull sales data directly from brand-side POS and DSS systems, no automated invoice import from food suppliers, and no compatibility with the corporate reporting structures Del Taco and, later, Jack in the Box required.
The effects showed up everywhere. Financial reporting was almost entirely manual, with Hartman’s predecessor spending the bulk of their time assembling and reconciling presentations rather than overseeing operations or strategy. Closing the books took close to two weeks after period-end just to produce a first draft for leadership review, and the accounting team routinely worked Saturdays, sometimes two a month, to get there.
By the time anyone saw the numbers, the money was already spent. “If you’re two months behind, you’re two months behind,” Hartman says of the old cadence. “You try something, then you wait a whole period to see if it worked.”
Regional and store-level leaders had no direct access to their own financial data at all. Every decision ran through corporate, and by the time issues surfaced in a report, they were weeks old.
There wasn’t a lot that had the horsepower that R365 has. I was like, ‘Well, we’ve got to go with these guys.’
Jay Hartman, CFO
3 BROTHERS RESTAURANTS
Hartman evaluated the market and settled on Restaurant365, drawn to what he describes as the platform’s depth relative to alternatives.
“There wasn’t a lot that had the horsepower that R365 has,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well, we’ve got to go with these guys.’”
R365’s established relationship with Jack in the Box turned out to be pivotal. In March 2024, the company acquired more than 40 corporate Jack in the Box locations in a single transaction, instantly doubling its footprint to roughly 80 restaurants across two brands.
“We literally bought 40-some Jack in the Boxes overnight,” Hartman says. “We doubled our size overnight.”
Without R365 already in place, he says, “that would have been just a nightmare.”
For the new Jack in the Box entity, Hartman built accounting processes natively in R365 from day one rather than migrating off a legacy system, leaning on the Del Taco team’s implementation experience to move quickly.
A core part of the solution was extending cloud-based, permissioned reporting down to the regional level, giving regional directors view-only access to their own region, including scanned invoices, without the ability to edit underlying data.
The clearest early signal that the switch was working came from the company’s accounting manager. Less than two periods after go-live, Hartman asked her how things were going. She told him: “I didn’t have to work Saturday, and I haven’t had to work the last couple of Saturdays to close the period.”
Since then, financials are substantially complete within a few days of period-end, reviewed first by the operations VP and then by Hartman. Sign-off typically lands the following Monday, and results are delivered to leadership the week after, cutting roughly a week and a half off the old timeline to leadership.
“We can make changes weekly in the period and try to salvage the period,” Hartman says. “It’s just so much more real-time.”
Regional directors are now using that same real-time access to manage their own P&Ls.
“They understand so much more now what’s being spent in their stores and why, versus just believing that leadership is making the right decisions,” Hartman says. “Now they have control of their job, their region, their team.”
That visibility has translated directly to the bottom line: Year-to-date, Jack in the Box transactions are down 4% and sales down 1%, while Del Taco has seen transactions and sales down roughly 4-5% on a blended basis. Despite that, 3 Brothers has held to — or exceeded — the bottom-line budget it set for the prior year.
“Most people are operating in a really down market for sales,” Hartman says, “but we are controlling the P&L to the point where we’re maintaining our bottom-line budget or exceeding it.”
The acquisition also tested how efficiently the back office could scale. Jack in the Box came with an outside bookkeeping firm and a small in-house team; 3 Brothers retained the controller, wound down the outside firm over roughly a year, and today runs both brands with that controller plus one shared team member — a net addition of just one person to manage a business that had doubled in size.
Most people are operating in a really down market for sales, but we are controlling the P&L to the point where we’re maintaining our bottom-line budget or exceeding it.
Jay Hartman, CFO
3 BROTHERS RESTAURANTS
For 3 Brothers Restaurants, Restaurant365 transformed from an accounting system upgrade to the infrastructure that helped the company absorb a sudden doubling in size without a corresponding spike in back-office cost or complexity.
With real-time reporting now reaching from the CFO’s desk down to the regional director level, decisions that were once impossible or less impactful on the P&L due to a lag of a full period or more can now be made in the week they matter.
1.5 weeks cut
from period-end close time, eliminating routine weekend work for the accounting team
100% of bottom-line budget maintained
despite a 4% to 5% decline in transactions across both brands
Scaled from 40 to 80 restaurants
across two brands with just one net new back-office hire
80 restaurants on one real-time platform
giving every regional director self-service access to store-level financials and invoices
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.
