January/February, 2003
The Automated Back Office - Flexible, robust back-office apps integrate general ledger, financials and accounting
by Dave Kelley
If you've ever seen the scene in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times where Chaplin's hapless Tramp gets caught in the gears of the machinery he's working on, you know what it's like to be a restaurateur in these modern times. Information comes at you from all sides, you have to wear enough hats to qualify as a part-time hat-rack, and you have to make quick decisions based on the data at hand. And, while you're at it, you need to trim the budget by five percent.
The advent of back-office applications that integrate general ledger, account and cash accounting functions (just to name three of these applications' capabilities) are allowing restaurateurs to move beyond Excel spreadsheets and are providing excellent results by automating the back office through unified application suites or a base application that offers modular flexibility....
....Modular applications that integrate with existing software also deliver fast, flexible, mission-critical data that improve reporting and accounting. A modular back-office application can be an obvious choice if you've recently invested in an accounting system and are looking for integration. It also can be a cost-saver if you invest only in the base application and wait until you actually need additional modules' capabilities before adding them.
High flying apps
Global Miami Joint Venture (GMJV), which owns two combined Au Bon Pain and Cozzoli's Pizza quick-service outlets, five fast-casual Cuban restaurants (Cafe La Carreta and four Cafe Versailles), two snack bars and two full-service bars in the Miami International Airport, chose a modular solution- EatecNetX (www.eatec.com)-to handle all its outlets.
"We needed an application that could handle recipe development and costing, inventory and production management, and purchasing and receiving," says Dale Robinson, GMJV vice-president of operations.
Ease of implementation and extreme flexibility were the most important factors in GMJV's decision. The modular capacity allowed for specific functionality at specific outlets, without redundancies or unused capabilities. Yet, Robinson reports, the training time is minimal. As a result, while it's hard to precisely calculate ROI for a back-office application, GMJV expects to recoup their investment quickly through improved reporting and accounting with all data residing at a central, Internet-accessible server, while keeping employee downtime due to training to a bare minimum....
....Whether driven by a need for greater flexibility, greater control over reporting, or any of a dozen other benefits they deliver, restaurateurs from single units to worldwide franchisees are finding that upgrading to new, more powerful back-office applications is a sure way to receive quicker dividends.
This was excerpted from the January/February 2003 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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