Warning Signs Your Restaurant Group is Outgrowing QuickBooks: Painful Audits and Challenging Forecasts

Early on, while quickly growing, running your restaurant group on QuickBooks makes sense. However, as you grow and become more established, you need more than what QuickBooks can offer. You stand to lose by relying on manual approaches (i.e., spreadsheet accounting).

"Hidden costs" of Spreadsheet Accounting

Severely constricted time horizons: CFOs need to make projections confidently over extended periods. The full impacts of pricing changes, new trends in your KPIs, and similar activities are often not apparent immediately. Just because you can manually forecast a short way into the future doesn't mean you have a long-term, crystal-clear view.

Costly manual errors: Entrusting the daily operations of your accounting department to manual processes leaves you vulnerable to human error. When your team is frantically working overtime to get the books closed at the end of the month, or manually sending an important invoice, realize that you're only one minor slip away from a potential mistake.

Limited audit accounting functionality: From the compliance point of view, manual processes pose a large risk. Automated accounting audits can reverse this situation.

A disconnect from your KPIs: One of the most significant issues with spreadsheet accounting is that it egregiously limits your understanding of the important metrics needed to run your restaurant group. Automated financial dashboards allow incredible detail into your KPIs.

What Makes Accurate Forecasting So Vital?

If your accounting department is unable to execute accurate long-range forecasts, then one of its most critical functions is being left unexecuted. Or, at the very least, critically underutilized, and it results in real money being lost.

When making tough hiring decisions, you need all the financial information you can access. Automated cloud-based forecasting allows you to run detailed hiring scenarios and make multi-factor projections. Poor hiring burns through cash, harms team morale and holds you back on your strategic goals.

Restaurant Groups that leverage cloud-based accounting are more agile because of automation's incredible speed and accuracy.

For example, when accounting workflows are automated, it becomes possible to have real-time visibility into the financial performance of your restaurants, enabling better and more informed decisions. That real-time insight is especially critical when costs are rising rapidly.

With manual and spreadsheet methods, accounting teams could struggle for days or weeks over complex manual projections that automation could arrive at virtually instantly. While manually operated companies are still struggling with recession projections and plans, many automated teams are already back to business as usual.

By significantly reducing the amount of time required to process day-to-day accounting entries and bringing greater accuracy and control, automation can drive a faster financial close. As just one example, instead of starting a bank reconciliation at the end of the period, automation enables daily reconciliation of cash and bank deposits, so the accounting team only must review exceptions. At the end of the period, the bank reconciliation is already done – and there is greater control and visibility over cash since variances are getting flagged as they occur instead of weeks later.

Centralized and automated accounting helps you observe and utilize the hidden connections abounding in your business. Automation supports an integrated and interconnected internal environment for many companies, so you can actively watch every element of your business work smoothly together.

Especially now that times have gotten tough in the broader markets, robust and accurate forecasting will distinguish between restaurant groups that thrive or financially falter.

Truly Effortless Forecasting

Automation is one of the best ways to ensure accurate forecasting over long periods for complicated scenarios. Compared to manual forecasting, it's unparalleled in the clarity it can give accounting teams:

Consolidated views: Many accounting departments rely on spreadsheet accounting, which spreads their information into different files and folders. This colossal time sink routes valuable resources away from key profit-driving activities. Sage Intacct offers visual data consolidation with streamlined financial dashboards. Your team leaders and restaurant operators have all the data they need on a single screen. No spreadsheets are required.

Scale your pricing strategies easily: When planning new pricing models, automation lets you forecast at scale and far into the future. This is important because pricing alterations don't always behave long-term the same way they behave in the context of short-term, small-scale projections and forecasts. Speaking of scaling, automation also ensures that your accounting abilities scale with your broader business to avoid bottlenecks.

Monitor KPIs in depth: Cloud-based accounting connects you to your metrics in real time, so you can better observe, influence, and improve them going forward. CFOs are directly responsible for optimizing their company's financial metrics, and spreadsheets are no longer the best way to accomplish this.

Yet the benefits of the cloud for finance leaders don't end there. Let's take a quick look at auditing in accounting.

Automated Audits: Embrace the Future

Automated auditing has become essential in today’s complex accounting environment. While no one necessarily looks forward to an audit, automating the accounting process will make it relatively painless. Specifically, you'll be able to:

Always know why: Sometimes, it's not sufficient to document the purely technical elements of a transaction, and auditors request to know what motivated the change. Sage Intacct allows you to permanently record and store why something was done in addition to what was done.

Access continuous audit trails: An important warning sign that it might be time to upgrade your accounting solution is when audits get painful and confusing. When did a transaction change, and what did it change to? Being able to confidently chart transactions is a big component of remaining GAAP compliant.

Use drillable financial dashboards: Consolidated financial dashboards allow you to access auditable data much more quickly than manual means. You'll also be able to drill further down into your dashboards to analyze complex transactions, performance cards for account groups, and other important information.

"Managers move stores all the time. It isn't uncommon to shift territories. Tablespoon built reports that are easy to transfer as our managers move around. It is nice having an accounting system that is so user-friendly," says Mountain West Wendy’s.

Audits will probably never be fun for any accounting professional; fortunately, Sage Intacct gets them as close as humanly possible.

If you are outgrowing QuickBooks, or if you’re done with spreadsheet accounting, contact our team.