Paperchase is a global, hospitality-oriented accounting firm dedicated to providing clients with the tools, insights, and time to nurture their businesses to their full potential. From humble beginnings in London in the 1980s to its growth into the United States and the Middle East, the firm serves clients of all shapes and sizes, their employees, and their guests.
“We take pride in the hospitality industry because it’s a place where everyone has access,” said Senior Account Manager Ruchika Mundhra. “It’s a place where everybody in every country at every income level has a seat at the table.”
Since the firm’s inception, it has offered clients specialized teams and local accountants who provide analyses to boost margins and profitability. Accountants take on time-consuming daily processes like AP, AR, reconciliation, and vendor management, working day and night to deliver quick, accurate bookkeeping and reporting while helping clients complete audit work, finish and reconcile tax returns, and create and upload budgets and depreciation reports. Until recently, however, doing so was a massive logistical and technical challenge to the industry.
The Waiting Game
For years, Paperchase had few choices in accounting platforms, ultimately relying on tools generic accounting tools like QuickBooks Enterprise.
“Everything was manual, and there was little to no integration,” Mundhra said. “We had to spend a lot of time entering the data, reviewing it, ensuring that it was correct, crunching it, and then analyzing it.”
All of that work took Paperchase’s accountants seven to 10 days to complete after each period closed. While much of the industry had long waited until the month’s end to complete those tasks and produce reports, Paperchase knew they needed to turn it all around more frequently to meet the fast and furious needs of the restaurant industry.
"We use the incredible power of R365’s reporting to deliver actionable advice that helps restaurants increase controls and oversight, maximize their margins, and expand."
Jumping Ahead
When Paperchase partnered with Restaurant365 in 2017, the firm knew the way forward included less time on the nitty, gritty, day-to-day number crunching that was long the hallmark of accounting firms and more time bringing value to its clients by serving as business advisers while helping them to become data-first organizations.
In doing so, the firm boosted its internal efficiency to foster its growth and that of its clients. Soon, its clients started growing faster with reduced overhead and became truly data-driven in pursuit of record-setting cost reductions.
“With R365’s integrations and partner relationships, everything is already done for us and in one, easy-to-access place,” Mundhra said. “Your sales are coming in, labor, invoices, payments, everything is happening in one platform, and what happens is you start to see everything in real time, and you’re able to give those valuable insights and feedback to your client.”
The platform was also instrumental in Paperchase’s evolution as an accounting firm.
“R365 really helped us to be able to focus on the work that we actually wanted to do,” Mundhra added.
All for The Bottom Line
That sharpened focus produced a myriad of benefits.
Paperchase quickly stood up one client’s complete R365 integration, and with custom financial reports, quick period close, and the firm’s analysis and advice, it grew from three to 14 locations in three years with plans to double that footprint by the end of 2023.
Along with access to a specialized team, Paperchases’ clients save significantly on accounting fees. As one franchise group grew from 14 to 54 locations during the past three years, the firm trimmed its per-location fee by 32%
At the same time, Paperchase used R365 to monitor the company’s labor costs and checked in daily with location operators, providing guidance enabling them to reliably meet labor forecasts and budgets. The effort yielded a year-over-year labor reduction of 4.3%, even as the company boosted its revenue and tripled in size.
Chasing The Next Goal
That kind of growth is precisely what everyone in the restaurant industry is after, but only recently, with Restaurant365, have operators and accountants been able to get and maintain the pace they’ve long desired.
“Things are happening so fast today, ensuring accounting is keeping up and offering real-time insight and value is challenging,” she added. “You need to be able to look at the business at the individual store, regional, and enterprise consolidated levels.
R365’s reports have been essential to look at the business and its performance in the ways that matter most, and previously, with traditional accounting software and Excel spreadsheets, you had to do it all manually,” she added.
