The monthly pack that tells you what went wrong in week one
You run staff restaurants and coffee bars at a handful of client sites: an office campus, a manufacturing plant, a college and two smaller offices. Each site manager sends a weekly spreadsheet with takings, purchases and a rough stock figure. Some send it on Monday, some on Wednesday, one forgets.
At month end, accounts pull supplier invoices from Xero, compare them to the site returns and work out GP. The factory site shows margin well below where it should be. Looking back, it started in the first week, when a new menu went in and a supplier price rose. By the time anyone saw it, the month was gone.
Three sources of truth that never meet
Site GP needs three things: what was sold, what was bought and what is left on the shelf. Each of those is recorded in a different place, by different people, on a different timetable.
- Sales come from the site tills, which may be different makes at different sites, or from a client's cashless system.
- Purchases come from supplier invoices that go to head office, often days after the delivery.
- Stock is counted by the site manager, at whatever interval they manage, on a sheet.
- Credits, transfers between sites and staff meals are handled inconsistently.
- The site spreadsheet is built by hand and its formulas change over time.
Site managers are cooks and managers first. Asking them to be accountants every Monday gets you an honest but rough answer, late.
Finding out a month late
When GP drifts at a site, the causes are usually ordinary: a supplier price rise, waste after a menu change, portion sizes creeping, a delivery charged but not received. Each is fixable in a week. Found a month later, the loss is already booked.
It also affects your relationship with the client. If your contract includes a subsidy or a cost-plus element, weak figures lead to awkward conversations at the quarterly review, and you want to arrive with explanations, not surprises.
The time cost is real as well. Accounts spend the first days of every month chasing site returns and reconciling them to invoices, instead of reviewing the numbers.
A weekly site view built from the source data
- Till sales are pulled from each site's till system or cashless provider through an API or a scheduled export, and mapped to your sales categories.
- Supplier invoices in Xero or your purchasing system are tagged to the site they were delivered to, including credit notes.
- Site managers do a short weekly count of key lines on a phone or tablet, with the full stocktake at the interval you choose.
- Transfers between sites, staff meals and hospitality recharges are recorded through simple forms so they are not lost in the figures.
- The system calculates weekly GP per site and per category, and compares it with the target you set for that site.
- Sites below target are flagged with the lines that moved most, such as a product whose invoice price rose or a category with purchases well above sales.
| Input | Comes from | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Site tills or cashless system | Daily, automatically |
| Purchases | Supplier invoices in Xero | As they are posted |
| Stock | Site manager's count on a phone | Weekly key lines, full count on your schedule |
| Adjustments | Transfer and staff meal forms | As they happen |
Where supplier invoices arrive late, the system can use the delivery note or order as a provisional cost until the invoice is posted, clearly marked as provisional.
An operations week with numbers in it
On Tuesday morning, the operations manager opens one screen and sees each site's GP for last week against target. The factory site is down, and the drill-down shows purchases of one category rising while sales stayed flat. A phone call to the site manager finds a new supplier item that is being over-ordered. It is fixed that week.
Site managers spend less time on spreadsheets and more time running kitchens, because the numbers are built for them. Month end becomes a check, not a reconstruction, and the quarterly client review starts with figures you already understand.
Do you recognise these?
- Site GP arrives by spreadsheet, and some sites are always late.
- You find out about a margin problem at month end or later.
- Supplier invoices are not easily matched to the site they were for.
- Stock counts are irregular and done on paper.
- Accounts spend the start of each month chasing site returns.