Running a successful hospitality enterprise is challenging enough with wage and labor issues, rising costs and increasing competition. Outdated, fragmented financial systems, however, make it even more difficult and time-consuming to manage and grow a business in the industry.
Restaurant franchisee StarCorp knows this challenge firsthand. The company struggled with siloed accounting software and spreadsheets that required a lot of manual processes, from reconciling financials for 144 locations to keying in data from the accounting software to the payroll system. It was tedious, inefficient and left too much room for error, controller Cesar Elizondo said. “Financial reporting could take a long time. We were putting a lot of things in a spreadsheet and not really forecasting,” he said. “And, obviously, the more you key in data, the more likely it is you’re going to have errors,” Elizondo noted.