As a restaurant operating across multiple branches and cities, your business could be booming and you may be getting all the well-needed attention. However, behind the scenes and all that beaming smile you give to your customers, you could be juggling your expenses the old-fashioned way. Managers email bills, approvals lag, and overdue payments lead to late fees. If this happens across multiple outlets, the challenges are multi-fold.
Restaurant chains, quick-service restaurants (QSRs), and hospitality businesses face many challenges when managing their recurring spending. Let us understand how cloud kitchens and restaurants can prevent fraud, gain visibility, control costs, and track spending in real-time using the right business spend management software.
The Challenges of Multi-Branch Restaurant Spend Management
Running a restaurant chain isn’t just about great food—it’s also about keeping money matters under check. Here’s what finance teams usually encounter in the absence of a restaurant management system in place.
- Tracking spends manually: If you’re still relying on spreadsheets to manage payments, you know how quickly errors creep in. One wrong entry and suddenly, you’ve “paid” the electricity bill only on paper.
- Petty cash chaos: Without a proper system, tracking petty expenses turns into a guessing game. You are incurring expenses but the receipts are missing. As a result, it gets buried under sundry expenses.
- Late utility bill payments: It’s easy to overlook a due date when you’re managing multiple locations. However, one overlook can cost you penalties or disruptions during the dinner rush.
- Zero real-time visibility: How do you prevent an expense when you can’t track it in real-time? Most restaurants often lack visibility into spends making it difficult for CFOs to identify opportunities for cost savings.
- Rent management: Keeping track of multiple rent agreements, renewal dates, and payment terms manually can take a toll on your finances. One missed deadline, and you’re dealing with penalties.
The Hidden Costs of Inefficiency in Quick Service Restaurants
It’s rush hours, orders are flying in, and everything seems to be running smoothly until someone realizes there’s much less garlic than required. A quick check reveals that the stock for garlic was not updated. As a result, you end up paying extra from your petty cash for an urgent delivery.
This is just one example of how financial inefficiencies quietly eat into quick-service restaurants and cloud kitchen profits when there is no business spend management software that also covers petty cash and utility bill payments. Especially in the case of delivery-first setups, that are designed for speed and cost savings, a lack of the right controls can lead to money leaks. This can defeat the very purpose for which they came into existence. Cloud kitchens might be built for efficiency, but behind the scenes, financial leaks can quietly drain profits.
Here’s where things start to go sideways:
- Complex Inventory Management: Without proper tracking, your supply chain turns into a guessing game. One week, you’re drowning in tomatoes; the next, you’re out of spices. All of this takes a toll on your petty cash because most last-minute orders are paid by petty cash.
- Hidden Logistics Costs: Running multiple cloud kitchens means ingredients are constantly on the move. But between supply transfers, last-mile delivery costs, and fuel expenses, a small fortune disappears without anyone noticing. Without real-time tracking, these hidden costs stack up, slowly chipping away profitability.
- Inefficient Utility and Rent Payments: Cloud kitchens run on electricity, internet, and leased spaces. But when payments are tracked manually, things slip through the cracks. One missed bill, and suddenly, the Wi-Fi is down or the power is out. Late fees and service disruptions start adding up, all because a reminder email got buried in someone’s inbox.
- Lack of Real-Time Financial Data: Most QSRs and cloud kitchens rely on scattered reports that only tell half the story. Without real-time insights, spending decisions are based on hunches. This leads to unexpected losses and budgets that never seem to add up.
Leveraging Automation for Utility Bills, Rent Payments, and Petty Cash Expenses
If you are running a cloud kitchen or a quick service restaurant, your focus should be on serving food rather than struggling to manage petty and recurring expenses. With the right approach for business spend management and solutions like Branch Recurring Operating Monthly Expenses (BROME), you can get better visibility into spends and save costs.
- Utility Bill Management: Imagine running a cloud kitchen or a restaurant and the electricity or the water supply goes off because you missed your utility bills payment on time. A well-designed business spend management software like BROME can automate your bill payments to avoid late fees and service disruptions.
- Rent Payment Optimization: Let your software schedule and automate rent payments and prevent penalties and missed deadlines. Moreover, automation can offer you detailed spending reports for better financial planning and forecasting.
- Petty Cash Control: Digitize your petty cash tracking and reduce errors and unauthorized spending. With a solution like BROME, you can also implement approval workflows for better accountability and fraud prevention.
- Financial Visibility & Control: With automation, you get access to dashboards that offer insights into spending patterns and cash flows. AI-powered analytics identify areas for cost reduction and efficiency improvements.
- Operational Efficiency: Reduce manual data entry and paperwork, saving time and labor costs. With automation, you can ensure accurate financial records for audits and tax compliance.
Implementing a business spend management software can be a good way to address these challenges. You may explore BROME, which caters specifically to utility bills, rent payments, and petty cash expenses of QSRs, cloud kitchens, or multi-branch eateries.
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What Makes BROME the Preferred Choice for Finance Teams
Clients from the hospitality sector like Subway have shared their feedback with us on how they use BROME. In one of our conversations, the Finance Director of a large multi-branch health food restaurant mentioned how BROME helps them.
- No More Missed Payments: BROME specializes in utility bills, rent payments and petty cash. It automates payments, so you’re never dealing with service disruptions (or awkward calls from vendors). You can cover up to 25 different types of utility payments for multiple branches from a single platform.
- Efficient Rent Management: Manage all lease agreements and track payments across locations without any hassles.
- Petty Cash Control: Every transaction is recorded, leaving little or no scope for any untraceable spends. Pay seamlessly through UPI or prepaid cards to make it easier for your branches.
- Better Budgeting: Petty cash expenses often lack transparency and visibility. With BROME, you can manage spends across multiple restaurants and cloud kitchens with better financial planning and fewer surprises.
- Faster Approvals: You don’t need to chase people for sign-offs. Petty expenses, utility bills, and rent payments get processed on time, every time. With BROME, you also stand a chance to earn cashback and exclusive rewards.
- Reduced Errors: Say goodbye to manual data entry errors that mess up your books.
- Reduced spends: Configure your policies and track expenses in real time to tighten up spending, avoid unnecessary costs, and keep your bottom line healthy.
Conclusion
Running a QSR or a cloud kitchen should be about serving good food and not worrying about petty cash fraud or paying utility bills on time. It may be helpful to develop processes and implement solutions that provide you clear visibility into your spending, help you prevent out-of-policy petty cash expenses, reduce errors, and forecast better. With the right systems in place, insights from multiple branches and not opinions may drive your decisions.
BROME is one such solution that not only tracks data in real-time for petty expenses across multiple branches. It also offers you cashback and rewards on timely payments of up to 25+ utility types.
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