Background
FTR Hospitality is a full-service restaurant consulting, accounting, and technology company, helping multi-unit full service restaurant groups efficiently integrate and streamline support center functions.
FTR Hospitality works with clients to identify and implement tech-savvy accounting, IT and other back-office business solutions. Services include outsource accounting and IT, as well as strategic consulting to help restaurant clients increase sales, reduce costs, and grow their businesses.
Challenge
In order to effectively serve clients, consulting and accounting firms are constantly looking for ways to provide services more efficiently. For FTR Hospitality, any gain in efficiency would allow the firm to grow, offer a greater breadth of services, and increase results for its clients.
Bryce Woodyard, the CEO at FTR Hospitality, spoke about the importance of efficiency as the driving factor for partnering with Restaurant365. “The single largest advantage of Restaurant365 is that everything is fully integrated,” he said. “From the accounting point of view, having everything on one platform makes it intuitive and easy to use.”
“The single largest advantage of Restaurant365 is that everything is fully integrated,” Mr. Woodyard said.
As a Certified Restaurant365 Accounting Partner, FTR Hospitality represents nearly 300 restaurant locations that use Restaurant365, with plans for further growth. This built-in efficiency is actually a selling point for Mr. Woodyard when he speaks to potential clients, especially if they are using a non-restaurant-specific system like QuickBooks.
“We know that if they’re not using Restaurant365, we can tell them, ‘So right now, you have six people in your accounting department. But if you switch to Restaurant365, you could probably use four and get the same work done—and it is probably better and more accurate,'” he said.
“It’s really easy to sell the cost-saving side of Restaurant365, because of the efficiencies,” he added.
Solution
Mr. Woodyard reported that while many of the firm’s clients first turned to FTR Hospitality for accounting or IT needs, what begins as a desire for accounting efficiency often quickly turns into an interest in other restaurant management tools.
“Once operators see what Restaurant365 can do, they usually become interested in applying numbers to other areas, like analyzing recipes or actual versus theoretical (AvT) food costs,” he said. “Operators may also become interested in consulting for managers on labor scheduling, because examining the numbers can quickly help restaurants save money inside the store.”
With clean data in hand, CEOs, CFOs, and owners are able to leverage tools beyond the accounting books. And with the use of Restaurant365, Mr. Woodyard found that FTR Hospitality was able to build its business by getting more deeply involved in the “numbers-based, consulting side” of restaurant operations.
In particular, Mr. Woodyard called out the usefulness of Restaurant365’s wide range of reporting functions. The firm uses reports like purchases by vendor, as well as AvT food costs, and. frequently leverages actual versus scheduled labor reporting in Restaurant365.
While these out-of-the-box reports are very helpful, Mr. Woodyard said that the firm relies heavily on Restaurant365’s custom financial reporting as well.
The ability to easily customize financial reports using Restaurant365 is a big selling point for FTR Hospitality, since “each client likes to look at numbers slightly differently,” he explained. “For a lot of other software systems, you’re kind of locked into using what they allow you to use. Restaurant365’s custom financial reporting tool allows us to customize to get what we need.”
When asked about implementing R365 at its clients’ locations, Mr. Woodyard called out how easy the implementation process can be for restaurant operators. “If we add a new client, we take it over, from start to finish,” he explained.
Results Achieved for Clients
As an outsource accounting partner, FTR Hospitality measures its success by how the firm can use Restaurant365 to help its restaurant clients increase efficiencies and profits.
As an example, Mr. Woodyard spoke about a 10-unit brand with $28 million in annual sales overall ($30 million pre-COVID) that FTR Hospitality moved from QuickBooks to Restaurant365 a few years ago. The first step was to clean up some “messy” books, and then run a two-to three-month implementation process for Restaurant365.
“Once we started getting clean data, we were able to really look at their purchasing,” said Mr. Woodyard. As opposed to QuickBooks, where you can’t get item-by-item detail, FTR Hospitality ran comprehensive reports out of Restaurant365 and started doing analysis on the client’s food purchasing. By doing the analysis with Restaurant365 and implementing some operational adjustments, FTR was able to help the client reduce food costs from 23% to 21%.
“Saving that 2% on $30 million, around $600,000, obviously had a huge impact for operations,” said Mr. Woodyard.
Using Restaurant365, FTR Hospitality was also able to help the client reduce labor costs by ranking the restaurant group’s individual stores on labor, giving operators the opportunity to identify those stores with higher labor costs and work with store managers to reduce those costs. “Overall, we helped save this restaurant group over $1 million. That’s just one example, and we probably have five or six more of those examples that are smaller brands, saving millions,” said Mr. Woodyard.
The efficiencies of an integrated restaurant management system help restaurant clients scale for growth, Mr. Woodyard reported. “Restaurant365 makes financials cleaner and more readable across locations,” he said. “With something like QuickBooks, you have to pop between locations just to compare stores.”
“From an efficiency standpoint, Restaurant365 allows us to charge the client less, or they can use fewer resources to do more,” he stated.
Results for FTR Hospitality
Restaurant365 doesn’t just stop at providing results for restaurants, Mr. Woodyard reported. The restaurant management platform also allows accounting partners to become more efficient, offer a greater breadth of services, and grow their businesses.
Overall, the efficiencies of Restaurant365 help FTR Hospitality offer more services to clients. Mr. Woodyard explained that the restaurant-specific automated bank reconciliation means that, depending on the size of a restaurant group, the company is saving a couple hours per bank reconciliation. “So if they have 50 bank reconciliations they need to do, that’s a hundred hours we’re saving every month,” said Mr. Woodyard.
“So if they have 50 bank reconciliations they need to do, that’s a hundred hours we’re saving every month,” said Mr. Woodyard.
“Say they run QuickBooks and have 10 units, they may have five people in their accounting department, just doing accounting,” he said. “We can do the same work, and better, with three people and Restaurant365. From a full time employee perspective, they’re saving 4,000 hours a year by just that switch.”
For FTR Hospitality, the all-in-one restaurant management system has also allowed the accounting firm to offer more consulting services. “It’s easy to get your foot in the door with accounting,” said Mr. Woodyard, “But then Restaurant365 allows us to turn on different parts of consulting. It’s really easy to add on things like consulting for scheduling or operations.”
As a Certified Accounting Partner, FTR Hospitality receives some referrals from Restaurant365, in addition to growth spurred by the firm’s business development. With the efficiencies and new consulting opportunities, Mr. Woodyard has seen a definite sales percentage growth for FTR Hospitality due to a partnership with Restaurant365. In general, Mr. Woodyard found Restaurant365 to be a helpful tool for the firm. It is easy to recommend to clients, he said, “because it is continually improving.””You run into a lot of these older systems, and the biggest issue that I see with them is that they’re on some legacy platform and haven’t continually innovated,” he explained.
“With Restaurant365, it seems that the company is always looking for the next step. R365 is continually updating the system so that it stays best in class,” Mr. Woodyard concluded.
