Tender Greens, the chef-driven, fast-casual brand with 25 units up and down the California coast, has long prided itself a pioneer of innovation in the industry. When the brand formulated some ambitious growth goals a few years back, it recognized that it first needed to put systems in place that would make expansion a more simplified process. That’s why Tender Greens reached out to Sage Intacct, to help transition from legacy, on-premises accounting software to a cloud-based platform that would help seamlessly unite all of the brand’s accounting data under one roof.
“We’re always focused on efficiencies whether that’s processes, controls, systems—we want the best version of whatever we implement,” says Sean Skuro, controller at Tender Greens. “The reporting and dashboard of Sage Intacct is unparalleled in the industry. We really pride ourselves on financial literacy and visibility for our managers, and Sage has allowed us to do that.”
Tender Greens was yet another client that had reached out to Sage Intacct for this exact reason. And the results of the partnership were illuminating as to why many, like Skuro, consider Sage Intacct to be second to none: Tender Greens slashed its accounting overhead by 20 percent while growing sales by 90 percent during the same time period. The accounting overhead dropped from 0.94 percent of sales to just 0.74 percent of sales, allowing Tender Greens to cut out more than one full-time position.
Here’s how that was accomplished: Sage Intacct automated several tasks that used to be tedious paperwork for somebody on the accounting team. No longer did Tender Greens need to manually enter each location’s revenue, costs, and expenses into a spreadsheet—Sage Intacct handled that on its own.
Sage Intacct’s role only grew as Tender Greens expanded, Skuro says, eventually becoming the “nucleus” behind the fast casual brand’s entire technology stack, helping integrate things as disparate as point-of-sales data and IT software. Payroll data, human resources entries—all of this was now updating in real time alongside all of the other information, helping Tender Greens make data-driven decisions and troubleshoot any issues before they proliferated.
“What we’re able to do with Sage Intacct—we’re able to look at metrics and trends to see how we performed two periods ago, last period, and this period, and next period last year so that we can prepare for the future,” Skuro says. “We get that data in real time and it helps us run our business more efficiently.”
Tender Greens is just one of hundreds of restaurant clients assisted by Sage Intacct’s team and software. Susan Casella, head of the hospitality vertical at Sage Intacct, says brands across the industry found the cloud-based solution to be especially pivotal during the pandemic, when difficult decisions about things like store closures and flexible hours were having to be made.
“There’s so much change going on in the industry right now that is difficult to navigate,” Casella says. “Many operators that we work with have told us how important it is for them to have access to financial data in real time. Because if you don’t have it accurately or in real time, you’re disadvantaged because you can’t make good decisions in a timely fashion.”
As a footprint grows, so do complexities. But Sage Intacct offers a cloud financial solution to those who want to make growth a streamlined process, Casella says.
“Many restaurants have separate silos of data in all of these different places,” Casella says. “That is really time consuming and by the time you’re sitting down to analyze it it’s already outdated. Sage Intacct becomes the one source of truth where all of this data lives, so you’re able to see a full 360 degree view of your business with in-depth reporting. Now it’s not living all over the place and you can see it in real time and react accordingly. That’s important no matter how many locations a brand has.”
For more on how Sage Intacct can help your brand streamlining efficiencies, visit the company’s website.
By Charlie Pogacar
