Urbane Cafe is a fast casual restaurant concept built around fresh, scratch made focaccia bread, founded in Ventura, California, in 2003 by Tom Holt. Every sandwich, salad, and bowl starts with bread baked in-house on a hearth oven, in full view of the guest. Holt developed the original recipe with his friend Pete, spending roughly a month developing dishes before the first location opened.
The company has stayed privately held through more than two decades of growth, including a minority investment from Andrew and Peggy Cherng, the founders of Panda Express, in 2017. Today Urbane Cafe operates 46 restaurants, up from 14 in recent years, and is working toward a long-term vision of 100 locations by 2030.
In the earliest years, Holt ran the business almost entirely himself. “I was doing accounting, I was doing the management schedules, all of those tasks,” he says of the company’s first one or two locations. That worked at a small scale, but it put a ceiling on how far the business could grow.
“That was never going to be scalable,” Holt says. “What’s scalable is building people, building processes, building food and recipes that can translate into operations.”
The growing pains hit hardest around restaurant five, when Holt had to step back from day-to-day operations to build out formal training programs and standard operating procedures. The back office was similarly stretched thin. Before R365, closing the books and compiling reports was entirely manual. One person ran the entire accounting function alone, with Holt handling the chart of accounts, until the company reached 17 restaurants.
R365 really helped expand that growth.
Tom Holt, Founder
Urbane Cafe
Looking for an alternative, Holt met R365 co-founder Morgan Harris, who pitched him on a platform that combined accounting and operations in one place. “I was like, wow, if you can do everything you say you can do, I’m in,” Holt recalls.
R365 became the system Urbane Cafe built its back office around starting at five restaurants, and Holt credits it directly with the jump from 5 to 10 locations. “R365 really helped expand that growth from the 5 to 10,” he says. “A lot of it was reporting that we couldn’t get side by side with any of the other platforms, and it was a reasonable cost.”
That included actual versus budget comparisons and theoretical food costing in the same system used for day-to-day accounting, along with the infrastructure to run full monthly close outs and P&L reports for the operations team at just five units.
As the company scaled further, R365 connected into the rest of Urbane Cafe’s tech stack, pulling in data from its point of sale, time and attendance, and payroll systems alongside other integrations, so the finance team could work from one consolidated picture instead of stitching reports together by hand.
That consolidation let Urbane Cafe build reporting tailored to its own business rather than relying on generic restaurant benchmarks. Because a meaningful share of sales comes from catering and third party orders, head of finance Sami Bisharat says the team built a metric around entrees per labor hour instead of relying on sales per labor hour alone, to get a consistent read on labor efficiency across all restaurants regardless of how a given day’s sales mix skews. “Really understanding entrees levels that playing field across all of our 46 restaurants to allow us to really be efficient and consistent,” Bisharat says.
Every restaurant now rolls up into one consolidated reporting system each morning, broken out by comparable versus non-comparable restaurants and by existing, new, and developing locations. Bisharat shares that same view with area coaches, regional coaches, and the leadership team.
At the store level, area operations coach Patty Acosta, who oversees four restaurants and came to Urbane Cafe from a concept with no equivalent system, describes R365 as straightforward to pick up. “It was very easy, very friendly,” she says. “It had tabs, you just pretty much went through each tab. So the training was pretty easy to come in and start doing it as an AGM and then as a GM.”
Since joining Urbane Cafe as head of finance in 2024, Bisharat has watched the brand grow from 31 restaurants to over 40, all without adding headcount to the accounting team. “Our teams are becoming more and more efficient,” Bisharat says.
Each period now closes within a handful of days, consolidated and comparable across every restaurant in the portfolio at once, which Bisharat attributes directly to automation: EDI based invoicing, faster scanning, and the variability analysis R365 runs automatically. That is a sharp contrast to the company’s earliest years when one main person, in addition to Holt, managed the books by hand up to 17 restaurants, which Holt recalls doing alongside 15 to 18 hour days just to keep building the business.
At the store level, Acosta has felt a similar shift. Reviewing her four restaurants two to three times a week instead of chasing numbers across disconnected systems, she estimates R365 saves her two to three hours a day.
“I’m saving hours, like two to three hours a day on reporting or not having my GMs stuck in the back when they could be at the front with our guests,” she says.
I’m saving hours, like two to three hours a day on reporting or not having my GMs stuck in the back when they could be at the front with our guests.
Patty Acosta, Area Operations Coach
Urbane Cafe
For Urbane Cafe, R365 became the infrastructure that let a privately held, family-run business grow without losing its own identity along the way. The company is more than three times the size it was in recent years, with an accounting team no bigger than it was at a fraction of the store count, and it is still building toward 100 restaurants by 2030.
Holt counts that kind of growth, in people as much as in store count, as what excites him most: employees who started as prep cooks are now managers and area coaches. With consolidated, same-day visibility now reaching from the CEO’s desk down to individual area coaches like Acosta, Urbane Cafe has the reporting foundation to keep scaling the way Holt always intended, thoughtfully and on its own terms.
46 restaurants
now running on one platform, up from 14, without growing the accounting team
2–3 hours saved daily
on reporting for store and area leadership
5 restaurants in
Restaurant365 enabled full monthly close outs and carried Urbane Cafe to 10 locations
50 restaurants targeted
for next year, with 100 planned by 2030
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