The Challenge
Luke’s Lobster is a fast-casual restaurant group with 29 domestic locations and 13 international locations in Japan and Taiwan. Established in 2009, Luke’s Lobster has been growing at a rapid pace since its first month in business. After four years in business, the restaurant group began seeking a new reporting platform to fit its needs as the restaurant group continued to expand across the country and the world. Luke’s Lobster needed a dynamic, cloud-based software to keep accounting records for multiple locations to allow their restaurant group to scale its locations without scaling the people involved in the back office.
The Solution
Luke’s Lobster made the switch from Quickbooks to Restaurant365 because of the software’s multi-functionality for multiple locations and the centralized database for all of its accounting and reporting information.
When it comes to scaling the number of its locations, Luke’s Lobster wanted software that saved time by offering the tools to allow the reporting of 29 restaurants to be completed in the same time as it would for one restaurant.
The ability to record the transfer of resources between restaurants was also something Luke’s Lobster needed in its software. Because of the centralized database, a transfer of resources from location A to location B is automatically recorded across the system, eliminating the need for both locations to record the transfer.
“One of my favorite features allows you to upload a long database spreadsheet into the system in one click,” said Steve Song, Chief Financial Officer of Luke’s Lobster. “Other systems do not give you that ability, and you would have to type out thousands of lines of transactions.”
“Because all of our data is in a centralized place, someone in my level can always see what is happening at the store level,” said Song. “There is no need to play detective because everything is connected and synced.
Luke’s Lobster operators continuously find value in each new module released by Restaurant365, as the software turns a bare-bones accounting system into a full enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Based on his previous experiences, Song finds Restaurant365 features more efficient than Quickbooks.
“Rather than just recording what has happened in the past, Restaurant365 provides tools to better manage business, labor, food cost tracking, waste, ingredient pricing and more,” said Song. “We also love the fact you can go back in time and fix mistakes, where as with other software, you can only put a band-aid over it rather than solving the underlying problem.”
At the restaurant level, managers’ ability to have their own login information and data to understand what is happening within each of their locations is hugely valuable to them, according to Song. They are able to easily answer questions like, “Why is my labor high?” and make adjustments based on the data Restaurant365 provides. The aggregated data Restaurant365 provides has been incredibly helpful to Luke’s Lobster’s operations team, as well. Because everything is automatically recorded in one place, the team can capture any information they need themselves, eliminating the need to email accounting to request a specific report to then wait for them to respond. The less email, the better!
Finally, Luke’s Lobster feels like more than just a Restaurant365 customer. Because of the co-founders’ ethos, the Luke’s Lobster team feels like the company is part of Restaurant365’s idea generation and development team. “I don’t think I could get that at other companies,” said Song.
For a business like Luke’s Lobster to scale thoughtfully and quickly, having Restaurant365 do the heavy lifting in the back office allows the team to focus on what really matters – growing its business.If you’d like to achieve the types of results that Luke’s Lobster has enjoyed since switching to Restaurant365, schedule a demo.
