Does Your Restaurant Serve Fresh Food and Stale Data?

In the restaurant business, one of the keys to surviving and thriving is serving your customers hot, fresh food.  This is not news, anyone in the restaurant business can tell you how true this concept is.  Based on this idea, most restaurants spend a great deal of time, energy, and money ensuring that their products meet or exceed the expectations of their customers.  On a daily basis, the finest ingredients are selected and prepared, and the staff knows how critically important it is to maintain this level of quality day in and day out.

Strange, then, to see how many restaurants (and the owners and managers) rely on a once per month upload of critical Point of Sale data to the ERP system.  Throughout the month, the full detail, daily information is being stored in the POS, and only the restaurant manager has much access to the information.  (By the way, this is often the only information the restaurant manager can access, the rest of his expenses are being held in the ERP system).  Then, at month end, the manager prepares an extract of data from the POS system (often exporting the data to Excel first), and then a General Ledger Journal Entry is prepared and uploaded to the ERP system.  This single extract of data will frequently be summarized as well, leaving the details of the month’s activity behind in the POS.  Why is your data stuck in your POS?

Now that the data is in the ERP system, financial statements, budgets and forecasts can be prepared and distributed back to the restaurant manager.  This process can often take a week or more to complete, which means that the manager will be making current decisions based on data that is getting very stale, and there won’t be a new re-fresh of his financial statements for another month.  It’s like driving a car using only the rear-view mirrors.

This is no way to run a business.  There has to be a better way!

For those restaurants working with Technology Management Concepts (TMC), we do have a better way.  Using Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains) as the ERP system, and leveraging the TMC Automation Framework (an integration tool developed by TMC), our restaurant clients get their data on a daily basis, “Hot off the grill” so to speak.  The tool has been designed to work with virtually any of the most common and popular restaurant POS Systems, including Aloha, MenuLink and more.  The key to managers making the best decisions is making sure they have access to the best information.

The Automation Framework leverages the high-speed data integration capabilities of Microsoft’s eConnect tool, with a user-friendly Excel interface.  Now, your integrations can be scheduled to run on a nightly basis, giving the day’s activity in detail. Your POS data, in full detail, automatically integrated into Microsoft Dynamics GP.  These integrations can be to the General Ledger as a Journal Entry, but they can also be to Accounts Payable, Payroll, and much more.

With all of the data now in Microsoft Dynamics GP, your restaurant can benefit from Microsoft Dynamics GP’s outstanding reporting and analytical tools, and make all of that information available to the managers and corporate officers.  Management Reporter, Dynamics Business Analyzer, Excel reports and dashboards, Dynamics GP can deliver the information thru the right tool for the right person.

Stop waiting for the end of the month to get accurate, detailed information on the financial condition of your restaurant.  With TMC and the Automation Framework, let your POS serve hot, fresh data to your ERP system every night of the week.

By TMC, Your Southern California Dynamics GP Partner