Founded in 1997, The Restaurant People is a multi-faceted hospitality group that develops, manages and operates restaurants and nightlife venues in Florida. In 2016 the group expanded beyond its Fort Lauderdale roots and CFO Michael Zielinski was faced with how to manage accounting systems and paperwork across two cities.
“When we decided to grow beyond one city, we needed to centralize our documents rather than physically drive around picking up invoices.”
Having outgrown Sage, Zielinski noted, “We started exploring third-party software solutions to add onto our POS. We would have needed multiple layers of third-party software to obtain the functionality we wanted. It was going to be expensive and complicated to enhance our infrastructure as we grew. Then we found Restaurant365 and were floored by all it could do within one system. It was a no brainer.”
After migrating to Restaurant365, Zielinksi and his team were immediately able to streamline their business.
“We were able to digitize six large filing cabinets. Now, at the end of the year, we don’t dig through filing cabinets to access our data. Everything is at our fingertips.” They also started saving time in meaningful ways. “Having master customer and vendor lists sounds simple, but in other systems we’d have to update an address 10 times. Now we update once and the information is unified across all of our entities,” Zielinski explained.
As The Restaurant People continues to grow and expand its use of Restaurant365 beyond accounting, the company can now rely on a support team that understands its business. “There’s no comparison between having a generic accounting system and one that’s dedicated to the restaurant business. The biggest difference is talking to support. They understand what we’re saying and they know all of the idiosyncrasies of the industry when it comes to POS systems and vendors. Restaurant 365 makes solving problems quicker and easier. We can fix issues within hours rather than days or weeks. Previously we were billed for submitting tickets to our reseller and now we contact support directly as needed,” stated Zielinksi.
Restaurant365 has allowed Zielinski and his team to deliver more accurate and timely results while saving resources across the business. “It’s staggering to think how much time we’re saving on payroll. We used to have a part-time person solely dedicated to processing our payroll. With Restaurant365, we’ve been able to reduce our accounting resources by 20%, even while adding eight new locations,” he concluded.
In addition to streamlining payroll, The Restaurant People has significantly cut down on manual data entry, freeing up time for more strategic work. The team also digitized six large filing cabinets’ worth of paperwork, eliminating the need for physical storage and improving document accessibility. Communication between accounting and operations has seen a noticeable improvement, thanks to centralized data and real-time reporting. Most notably, the company has reduced overall accounting resources by 20%—all while continuing to grow.
The Restaurant People set out to simplify operations, scale efficiently, and gain better visibility into their business—and with Restaurant365, they’ve done exactly that. From digitizing mountains of paperwork to bridging the gap between accounting and operations, the team now works smarter, faster, and more collaboratively. Backed by a support team that truly understands the restaurant industry, they’re equipped to grow with confidence and clarity.
20% reduction in
accounting resources
8 new locations
added thanks to R365
Saved dozens of hours
by decreasing manual data entry
Discover how you can start achieving savings like these for your business
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Restaurant365 bridges the gap between accounting and operations by centralizing all data, helping restaurant operators to become more efficient, accurately forecast, and tackle any challenge or opportunity with speed and accuracy.
