In 2015, with eleven locations and growing quickly, California Fish Grill realized its Quickbooks Desktop system was not scalable. Quickbooks was just an accounting system and it didn’t include robust operational tools like detailed inventory tracking, theoretical food cost tracking, and robust reporting. In addition, individual stores couldn’t access Quickbooks Desktop, so corporate was required to input invoices instead of decentralizing the task to the store level.
Paul Potvin, now CFO of California Fish Grill, recalls the frustrations of trying to make a similar system work in a previous role. “In the past I had a main accounting system, and then we had a separate accounting operations system for inventories and invoice entry. Those two systems spoke to one another, but they were never in sync,” he recounted. “So we didn’t have one database—stores were presenting weekly flash reports to us that didn’t eventually match up to the accounting system.“
Mr. Potvin realized that as California Fish Grill scaled, the company needed to find an all-in-one system that could streamline operations to meet both its accounting needs and its restaurant-specific operational challenges.
