Serving Up Fast and Fresh Data Collection to Improve Franchise Health
Fast casual Asian restaurant Teriyaki Madness implements ProfitKeeper by PrimePay across all franchise locations to make life easier for business coaches and 150 franchisees. Coaches and franchisees can now easily submit and view profit and loss (P&L) data to identify efficiency issues and find opportunities to increase profitability.
Making Healthy, Delicious Asian Food Available to Active People
Teriyaki Madness serves healthy, made-to-order food with an Asian flair. Its menu satisfies guests by featuring fire-grilled food made from high-quality ingredients.
“Our customers love food that’s fast, casual, and healthy with an Asian flair. Our Teriyaki bowls are filled with fresh ingredients and offer a healthy alternative for people on the go,” says Misti Hunt, Assistant Controller at Teriyaki Madness.
Since its founding in 2003, Teriyaki Madness has been recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine as a Franchise 500 Company and twice won Franchise Business Review’s Top 50 Franchise Satisfaction Award. The company’s commitment to franchisee support helped it grow to nearly 150 locations across the U.S., with another 50 scheduled to open this year.
Keeping up with all these locations, however, proved difficult since franchisees submitted P&Ls
manually and the corporate office stored them in binders. Teriyaki Madness needed to automate the submission of financial data to increase visibility, insight, and accuracy so franchises could quickly pivot to increase profitability.
The Pain of Manual Processes
Teriyaki Madness already had ProfitKeeper by PrimePay when Assistant Controller Misti Hunt arrived at the company three years ago. However, only nine locations used it. For the remaining franchises, Hunt collected monthly P&L statements via email, printed them out, and stored the hard copies in binders.
As P&L statements arrived each month, Hunt inputted the numbers into a spreadsheet to track submissions. It took several hours to update the spreadsheet and contact franchisees who hadn’t submitted their statements. On top of that, she would have to wait days for any delinquent statements to arrive. If the controller or coaches needed to look up data, they had to pull out a binder and flip through the pages until they found the right sheet. This process was an inefficient, time-consuming, and labor-intensive one that repeated each month.
This manual process made it hard to catch any discrepancies that occurred between the accounting software and P&Ls. The company couldn’t ensure the continuity and accuracy of the P&Ls, making it difficult to use the data for benchmarking.
“When I came on board, we weren’t utilizing any of ProfitKeeper’s tools, the scorecard, or any of the benchmarking,” explains Hunt.
Every month, they had to corral all the data and manually page through binders to look up the results from any given franchise. The lack of actionable, available data made it hard to get franchisees to use P&Ls as a profitability tool. It was also difficult for coaches to set accurate benchmarks and understand why some franchises were performing better than others..
With new franchises coming on every year, something needed to change.
Automation and Visibility From a Single Source
Fortunately, the solution was waiting for them: the ProfitKeeper by PrimePay platform.
ProfitKeeper by PrimePay is a financial management platform designed to provide a simple way for franchises with multiple locations to collect data and get a consolidated view of their entire franchise network. Franchises can use ProfitKeeper to aggregate data from multiple sources to track performance and trends, and benchmark against multiple franchise locations and industry standards.
“The whole reporting process was a logistical nightmare,” recalls Hunt. “No matter how fast I was, it still took time without automation at that point.”
With the company President cheering her on, Hunt worked closely with PrimePay to map the chart of accounts in ProfitKeeper so it matched the company’s accounting software. Integrating the chart of accounts into ProfitKeeper helped franchises and their accountants know exactly what needed to be in each P&L, creating continuity and data accuracy across the board.
ProfitKeeper provides complete visibility to the Teriyaki Madness corporate accounting team, business coaches, and franchises. Business coaches can log in and look at franchise data any time they want, without asking Hunt to rifle through pages in binders. Everything they need is right there for them.
Reporting and benchmarking in ProfitKeeper gives coaches the data they need to do their work more efficiently, accurately, and quickly. The reports are easy to understand, and unlike some other accounting software, franchisees only see what they need, making it easier to evaluate the information presented. Coaches can review benchmarks from location to location or state to state, and then advise franchisees of profitability and efficiency opportunities to help them pave a better path forward.
ProfitKeeper dashboards show analytics and insights that are fine-tuned to reveal revenue and expenses for each location. The dashboard contains charts that help franchisees visualize where they’re spending money, giving them a tool to help with decision-making for their restaurant. Not only are franchisees able to look at expenses and cash flow, but they are also more likely to reach out to coaches for help now that they have more data and insight.
The main office at Teriyaki Madness also benefits from ProfitKeeper. Using ProfitKeepers’s automated email reminders, they automatically send emails on the 15th of every month to remind franchises to upload P&Ls. This saves Hunt several hours each month in time spent gathering information, following up with franchisees, and running reports. ProfitKeeper’s delinquent report immediately tells Hunt who hasn’t submitted their reports, who has partially submitted and needs help, and who is running late.
“Before ProfitKeeper, it would take anywhere from two to three hours of just hunting down P&Ls, if not more,” says Hunt. “Now we have it fine-tuned so I can pull the delinquent report, export it, and forward it to the coaches.”
Having accounting information automated and reports readily available at any time saves time for administrative staff and franchisees, while coaches get to spend more time helping franchises find opportunities to increase their profitability.
“Having ProfitKeeper is a game changer for us,” says Hunt. “The first thing we do with the onboarding of new franchisees is train them on how to upload P&Ls to ProfitKeeper.”
Greater Franchisee Engagement = Greater Profitability
According to Teriyaki Madness, ProfitKeeper has had a fantastic effect on profitability. Reports allow the business coaches to review P&Ls quickly and notify franchisees right away if they see a problem. Profits can vary from location to location; Since implementing ProfitKeeper in Texas, its overall profitability is estimated to have increased by at least 4% to 5%.
“That’s why having a system like ProfitKeeper is important,” explains Hunt. “We can look at it, see what’s happening, and get the franchisees engaged to understand their P&Ls so they can use them as a profitability tool.”
Overall adoption of ProfitKeeper has been very good throughout the company. Of the 130 Teriyaki Madness locations currently open, only 11 haven’t yet fully adopted the technology. With automated email reminders, most franchises send their P&Ls right away, so Hunt can run reports the day after P&Ls are due and forward them to the business coaches the same day or the following day.
As new franchises come on board, they are immediately set up and trained to use ProfitKeeper — and they embrace it quickly. They are in the system right away so they know exactly what needs to be done from the start.
The company intends to continue getting value out of ProfitKeeper. As the company uses benchmarking tools and ranking reports, it’s investigating new ways to incorporate ProfitKeeper into the business. ProfitKeeper by PrimePay is such a priority that Teriyaki Madness sends out a monthly newsletter to franchisees containing Q&As and best practices to showcase the benefits and encourage franchisees to learn more about the technology.
“ProfitKeeper plays 100% into our future plans,” explains Hunt. “The goal is to utilize it to the best of our ability to help the franchisees with their profitability.”
In the last three years, Teriyaki Madness has grown from relying on hard-copy P&L statements and binders to using an automated reporting system that streamlines data collection and provides franchisees with vital information. They are then able to use this information to make informed decisions and increase their profitability. As the company expands its franchises across the country, it’s able to offer more support and growth opportunities to franchisees.
Growing your franchise network takes more than just skill and some elbow grease. You also need to know where to focus your efforts to increase your profits. Let ProfitKeeper by PrimePay shine a light on your data to help you make better business decisions. Learn more about ProfitKeeper by PrimePay today.