January/February 2002

Robust Financials - Challenging times call for beefing up back-office tools that monitor, control, report and forecast mission-critical data
By Dave Kelley, Contributing Editor

As the national economy goes through what can be politely called a "correction", restaurateurs are finding themselves eye-to-eye with ever-tightening budgets that demand closer scrutiny of everything remotely associated with back-office operations. And as the belt continues to tighten, back-office systems and applications are beefed up to provide mission-critical data at lightening speed. As Harvey Metro of Metro and Associates accounting firm in Washington D.C. put it in a recent report: "You gotta have information. The more information you have, the more detailed it is and the timelier it is, the better. Stale information is suicide."

The old model of relying on an outside accountant or firm to provide financial reports is quickly being phased out as restaurateurs realize that information provided by third-party vendors is rarely as timely as reports generated in-house through the use of robust back-office software, especially in the areas of general-ledger accounting and other important financial metrics.

One of the main benefits of beefing up the back-office reporting through a suite of applications is that it allows consolidation and centralization of the data. For a multi-unit operation, this puts critical information, both unit-level and system wide, at the fingertips of executives who need it.

Houlihan's Restaurant Group, for example, with more than 100 restaurants, locates its EatecNetX-powered (www.eatec.com) database at its headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. The system runs on a Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 platform deployed via a Citrix Application Server to each restaurant, with a TCP/IP connection governing data routing. The entire system is interfaced with the point-of-sale (POS) system and the financial reporting applications.

At any time, more than 100 users can be logged onto the system at Houlihan's, documenting purchases and inter-site transfers, doing cost analyses, developing recipes, tracking spoilage and recording physical counts. And all of these functions are posting and updating a single database.

As a result, detailed reports covering every aspect of business and financial operations are instantly available at all levels of the multi-unit operation - at each individual restaurant, each region and system wide.

"This powerful system has allowed us to significantly reduce the gap between theoretical and actual costs," says Melody Gerow, Houlihan's director of food and beverage information services. "We can spot the problem areas at each restaurant and give the restaurant operations division the opportunity to work with each manager on an individual basis to improve performance."

This was excerpted from the January/February 2002 issue of Hospitality Technology and may differ in content or context from the originally published article. To see the full text visit www.htmagazine.com.

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