Background
Founded in 2010 in Louisville, Colorado, Sweet Cow Ice Cream churns small batches of handcrafted ice cream into delicious treats. With items like Lucky Charms Sweet Cream and their vodka-infused Big Lebowski, they offer incredible flavor and personality to loyal customers. Initially planned as only a single location by founder Drew Honness, Sweet Cow quickly evolved into a successful brand with multiple locations across the Denver area.
In 2015, Sweet Cow turned to On-Call Restaurant Accounting (OCRA) for accounting support. OCRA now handles the review and approval of invoices, manages bank activity and reconciliation, and provides payroll support for the business. They also streamline many day-to-day accounting and financial tasks – resolving discrepancies and making necessary adjustments – and offering actionable, real-time insights for review and support in key decision-making.
Challenge
After launching, Sweet Cow quickly expanded to multiple locations, opening roughly one new shop yearly. In 2017, CEO Ross Cohen and COO Steve Bell drew back on the brand’s rapid scaling to focus on improving procedures and standards needed to run the company more efficiently.
“You need to earn the right to grow,” Bell said. “I’m a firm believer in that, and if you’re not nailing it 100% at your foundation, you need to take a step back and do that first.”
One of the first challenges was in store accounting. The company used QuickBooks, but the platform was difficult to use, time-consuming, and didn’t provide sufficient, timely insights into their operations. The lack of integration with other restaurant systems was another area of frustration, causing the company to spend too much time importing and exporting data between systems to get an accurate look at their financial records.
Sweet Cow reviewed their monthly profit and loss statements (P&Ls), which Bell saw as “too little, too late” to find areas to reduce food and labor costs. He also noted the chain couldn’t sufficiently track metrics like vendor pricing and inventory, only ensuring purchase orders had arrived. These processes inflated Sweet Cow’s operating costs, particularly when the company was overcharged for purchase orders or when vendor prices changed.
Bell suspected the brand’s labor costs were also too high. Employee scheduling was a labor-intensive, manual process for store managers, who had little insight into the connection between scheduling and store sales. Meanwhile, store managers spent far too much time navigating multiple systems for different tasks in the back office.
""Integration between our point-of-sale, Revel, and Restaurant365 gives us detailed insight into daily sales data. Now we can make smart scheduling decisions based on real, hourly sales data. And we can drill down to be much better at tracking what our vendors are charging us and any price changes."
Solution
Working with OCRA, the transition from QuickBooks to Restaurant365 marked a significant turning point for Sweet Cow, giving them greater insight into critical areas of their business.
“When we were in QuickBooks, we had multiple different files for each location,” said OCRA president and founder Mark Rubinstein. “As they’ve grown, that would have become next to impossible for us to manage without Restaurant365.”
Today, OCRA and R365 manage multiple instances and streamline all journal entries for each location, which was another area of inefficiency. Bell emphasized how Restaurant365 was particularly helpful as the brand expanded, providing a more detailed, accurate view of their daily operations to reduce labor costs.
“Integration between our point-of-sale, Revel, and Restaurant365 gives us detailed insight into daily sales data”, Bell said. “Now we can make smart scheduling decisions based on real, hourly sales data. And we can drill down to be much better at tracking what our vendors are charging us and any price changes.”
Inventory management also improved. Previously, Sweet Cow used several inventory systems, and Bell noted that each required manual labor, which made inventory management cumbersome. With Restaurant365, Sweet Cow now easily performs weekly counts of key items and monitors burn rates, reducing money sitting on the shelves, waste and product shortages.
“Everybody’s inventory is a little different based on your menu and what your suppliers require of you, and it’s easy to overlook something,” Bell said. “But with Restaurant365, the way it lays out tracking inventory lets us know what’s coming in and that we’re not getting overcharged. Our store managers analyze their inventories easily and get a lot of business intelligence from that. That’s been huge for us.”
Results
Restaurant365 now plays a vital role in delivering Sweet Cow’s custom financial reports tailored to its unique operational needs. The process has been specifically effective in tracking mobile units attached to Sweet Cow’s brick-and-mortar stores, allowing them to quickly review data from these units separately in a way that wasn’t available with standard reporting.
Rubinstein underscored the importance of Restaurant365’s custom financial reporting. “If you take Sweet Cow as a specific example,” the OCRA president said, “we just couldn’t have pulled off what we’re doing now with QuickBooks.”
“We can create custom financial reports and see those mobile units on an individual level to give us better insight into their performance,” Bell said. “Now we know how the shop and mobile unit are performing on their own, and then we cascade them up to their stores to see how the two are performing together. We didn’t have any of that insight before.”
Sweet Cow also moved from reviewing monthly P&Ls to a weekly cadence, which is now one of the most valuable reports they share with managers and use to drill down to specific metrics to see store performance and make more timely adjustments.
“Our managers get trained more quickly, and they can see where their areas of focus need to be much faster,” Bell said. “They only need to know one platform, and they go there for everything. And they spend much less time in front of a computer trying to make things talk to one another. That’s been a real game changer for us, too.”
Sweet Cow and OCRA’s collaborative journey with Restaurant365 exemplifies how leveraging specialized restaurant software can empower businesses to grow efficiently, make informed decisions, and achieve operational excellence. As Sweet Cow continues to thrive, their experience serves as a testament to the transformative potential of OCRA and an integrated restaurant-specific accounting, operations, and workforce platform.
