Removing Friction from the Back-of-House
Hospitality Technology recently had the chance to sit down with Melissa Haman, controller, Crazy Bowls & Wraps. A member of HT’s Restaurant Accounting Innovation Council, sponsored by Restaurant365, Haman and her fellow council members utilized time over the course of the last year to hear different needs and wants from other brands. “It was a big help for me to hear new ideas and best practices for how our company could improve accounting practices,” she notes. HT asked Haman to share some of her key takeaways and words of wisdom for our readers.
How complex is your tech stack? How easy or hard to get to is data from disparate systems?
MELISSA HAMAN: One item we are working desperately to achieve is a one point of entry for employee changes within the system. We would like our Human Capital System to be where the change is made. Once that change is made it would push into our restaurant management software (Restaurant365) and then push into our POS.
For example, if there is a rate change, it would be entered in the payroll/human capital system where the review and performance tasks are housed as well. This would then push into Restaurant365 updating labor and scheduler information for forecasting purposes with labor dollars. Then the new rate would push into POS for accurately allocated real-time labor. If each type of system could talk to each other without the current clunky process of getting there, it will be a huge win for the industry.
What challenges exist concerning visibility of data across platforms?
HAMAN: The area that continues to be a pain point for our team is when POS captures our time cards it currently can see when an employee works at multiple locations and correctly allocate labor only if under 40 hours. It does not see OT if employee works over 40 hours at multiple locations and then we have to manually adjust. Payroll pulls the data from POS (or Restaurant365, which is the same data) and if it is not correct at capture, the information needs to be adjusted and correctly allocated to location before payroll is processed, otherwise the GL template imported is incorrect.
If you were going to build an accounting system – what capabilities/features are on your wish list?
HAMAN: Ad hoc reports are still complex and take some time to run. I would enjoy seeing something to improve upon that. A detailed Pmix is extremely important for our team. I would love seeing a top 25 list that could be pushed out weekly to our team. The ability to auto push most of the reports with a bit of customization specific to our needs would be a big win as well.
We are looking for a prep production report that would produce a “what to make” today based on our sales trends and pmix data. I also continue to manipulate reports to make a per district “racked and stacked” comp report for period and year roll up since this is not an option currently in location comparison reporting. This should be something that is accessible within the system as it is a standard request from districts.