Food and drink industry case study

What was the problem?

Our client was a family run business which ran a café and was in its early stages where the family were all very heavily involved in running the business.

The business was starting to grow and the family was looking to expand into a second and third café but they didn’t really have any idea whether or not the business was profitable, and whether it would be worthwhile taking on more cafes.

How we helped find a solution

First of all we pulled together some accounts from the spreadsheets which were being kept by the owners. We were able to see that the business was profitable but could be much more profitable if savings were made in certain areas of cost.
We moved the bookkeeping onto Xero software and set up reporting categories in order to track different areas of the business.

We taught the family how to understand the different numbers and how to act on the information to make any changes. We organised the set up of stock counts to make sure that margins were being measured on all sales.

We then helped create a financial plan for the second café to make sure that it would be profitable from the outset.

What was the outcome?

The family are now in full control of the business because they understand how to use the numbers to make decisions about growing or margin improvement or staffing numbers. One family member told me that she can now sleep at night as she knows that everything is under control and that she has the information she needs to make the right decisions for the business.