How many hours are you spending monthly on manual processes within your restaurant group's accounting department?
Managing processes can be time-consuming for accounting and finance teams, especially when issuing and processing invoices, keeping track of budgets, and creating financial reports.
As your restaurant group grows and locations and/or brands increase, processes and reporting become more complex. Wasting time with manual data entry, unruly spreadsheets, and time-consuming workarounds is common. No matter how skilled your finance department may be, any system that manually inputs data from paper is slow and subject to human error.
Various studies report that nearly 9 out of 10 spreadsheets (88%) contain errors. Most of these errors were from human error (which could have been avoided). Even a tiny margin of error can result in enormous losses for restaurant groups. This can also lead to a lack of control and visibility, making you unable to manage your restaurant group effectively and make informed decisions. In today's economy, you need to make decisions quickly to combat the ever changing landscape of inflation and utility increases. According to a new survey from the National Restaurant Association, 92% of operators call food costs a “significant challenge,” and because of persistent inflationary pressures, 50% expect to be less profitable in 2023.
Automation can speed things up!
Spreadsheets are cheap and flexible, and we all know how they work, so they can be beneficial in most cases. However, as your restaurant group grows, spreadsheets become more complex, which can lead to more time wasted on maintenance. In addition, the more complex spreadsheets are, the more of a problem it can be for anyone to change, modify and even destroy data. Even if you lock them down, they lose the flexibility that made you use them in the first place.
By incorporating automation, you can:
- Reduce close days
- Increase agility
- Lower costs
- Improve productivity
- Reduce delays
- Minimize errors
Leaving your finance team with the time to focus on strategy, growth, and success. In addition, automation can decrease your financial close to a more manageable 3-5 days. It even has the potential to get rid of the close entirely.
One day in the future, you might be able to automate all the processes within your finance team. Automation makes a future possible where real-time data removes the need for a close—as you're always current. Most importantly, automating routine assurance and accounting workflow tasks frees your finance team to focus on more strategic activities.
How to adopt automation for financial processes.
As you start your automation journey, here are five suggestions from Sage Intacct:
1. Understand what kind of automation you need:
Every restaurant group is different, and getting the best value is crucial. Understanding what area of your finances could do most with automation is essential.
For example, you could focus on reconciliation, a massive drain of resources for any finance office:
Reconciliation is a process where you must match the entry in the bank account with the relevant invoice in your system once you receive payment. With some types of financial management software, it's possible to create rules where regular payments automatically match their invoices. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) means you can match up one-off or otherwise discrete payments.
Of course, someone from your team will still have to check the reconciliation. Still, there's a considerable time and labor difference between peering at two lists, matching things up, and simply checking that an existing reconciliation is correct.
Automation could allow you to import statements from your financial institutions and automatically reconcile them in minutes when managing your cash. As a result, you'd be able to quickly spot exceptions, manage bank errors, monitor for fraud, and maintain accurate cash balances.
2. Develop a business case:
When looking at automation within departments, you should question how economically viable opportunities are. Then, investigate what the return on investment would be. Finally, get relevant stakeholders from the departments in question and try and create a business case.
3. Get management buy-in:
You need to get information straight from stakeholders on what they understand when it comes to automation and how it would benefit them.
4. Support IT in setting up the systems:
If you have an IT team, or you outsource your IT, they can provide technical expertise to ensure automation implementation runs smoothly and quickly. With the cloud-based accounting software that implements automation, your finance team can become more agile and faster, gaining efficiencies by removing time-intensive manual tasks.
5. Get results:
Create a clear automation roadmap. You'll have to work closely with your people, who will drive the use of new technology. With the tech in place, you'll need to work at measuring your progress and ask a few questions of your finance team:
- How are you using automation, and are you doing it right?
- How effective are your new processes?
- Are they leading to the productivity and efficiency improvements you expect?
- What outcomes do you see with the new technology?
- How can you get business metrics for your intended goals?
The most successful restaurant companies today understand that technology is a key ingredient to growth and scalability. However, if the very thought of automating your restaurant group's finance department is overwhelming, you can lean on the Tablespoon team. Our mission is to help restaurant owners grow their businesses faster and more effectively. Contact our team to learn more.
