The template from head office
You run your territory as part of a children's sports coaching franchise. The brand, the programmes and the training come from head office. So does a monthly return: participants by programme, sessions delivered, schools and nurseries served, gross revenue, and the management fee or royalty that follows from it.
Your figures live elsewhere. Bookings and attendance are in the booking system the franchise uses, or one you chose. Income arrives through card payments, direct debits and school invoices in your accounts package. Some sessions are paid termly, some monthly. At the end of each month, you export, copy, total and paste into the head office spreadsheet. Some months head office queries a figure and you cannot remember how you arrived at it.
Why the return is so manual
- The franchisor's template does not match how your booking system or accounts group things.
- Revenue has to be counted the way your agreement defines it, which is not always the same as cash received.
- Termly and monthly payments do not fall neatly into calendar months.
- School and nursery contracts are invoiced separately from parent bookings.
- Nobody keeps a record of how each month's figures were built, so queries are hard to answer.
What a manual return costs
A day or more each month of the franchisee's time, which is time not spent selling to schools or coaching. Errors that lead to paying the wrong fee, in either direction, and awkward corrections with head office. Queries that take hours to answer because the working has gone.
It also hides useful information. The same data that feeds the return could tell you which programmes and venues are growing in your territory, but it is only ever assembled for head office.
A return built from your own systems
- We connect to your booking system, payment provider such as Stripe or GoCardless, and accounts package such as Xero or QuickBooks, through their APIs or exports.
- The figures head office asks for are mapped to your data once: which programmes count as which category, and how revenue is defined in your agreement.
- Each month, the return is filled in automatically in the franchisor's template or portal format.
- The fee is calculated using the rules from your agreement as you and your accountant read them, and shown with its working.
- You review the draft, see how each figure was built, adjust anything unusual with a note, and approve it.
- Each approved return is stored with its working, so a query months later can be answered from the record.
| Head office asks for | Comes from | Checked by |
|---|---|---|
| Participants by programme | Booking system and registers | Franchisee |
| Sessions delivered | Timetable and registers | Franchisee |
| Schools and nurseries served | Contract records | Franchisee |
| Revenue as defined in the agreement | Payments and accounts | Franchisee, with accountant if needed |
| Fee due | Calculated from the above | Franchisee |
We do not interpret your franchise agreement. The rules for categories and fees are confirmed by you, and your accountant where needed, before anything is automated.
Month end for a franchisee, afterwards
On the first working day of the month, the draft return is waiting. You look through it, notice a school invoice raised late last month that belongs in this one, add a note and approve. It is sent, or ready to paste into the head office portal, with the working kept.
When head office asks why nursery participants dropped in February, you open the stored return and see it straight away: two nurseries closed for a week of half term. The same data shows you which programmes grew in your territory this term.
Does your monthly return look like this?
- You rebuild the head office return by hand each month.
- Figures come from several systems that group things differently.
- Termly payments make monthly revenue hard to work out.
- Head office queries figures you cannot easily explain.
- The return takes time you would rather spend selling or coaching.