Life & Brand Portfolio, a fast-growing restaurant group, has simplified financial reporting and positioned itself for expansion following the implementation of the Sage Intacct cloud financial management platform.
The company worked closely with AWCape, a leading Sage Business Partner, as the implementation, consulting and integration partner for the roll-out.
Headquartered in the Western Cape, Life & Brand is a dynamic casual dining group that offers authentic food and beverage experiences using sustainable ingredients. Among the eight brands in the group are Tiger’s Milk, La Parada and Old Town Italy. Life & Brand wanted to refresh its financial systems with a modern, cloud-based platform to provide more timely business insights to its management team.
Sage Intacct was a compelling option for Life & Brand because of its deep multidimensional accounting and sophisticated visibility for real-time decision-making. Sage Intacct enables Life & Brand to easily view and analyse performance at store and brand level and run consolidated reports for the group.
Sage Intacct allows Life & Brand to generate reports on the operational metrics and unique business drivers, such as revenue or cost per head and profit per square metre or per seat. This empowers management with insights about performance at the store, brand and group level to make informed business decisions.
Sage Intacct provides reports, dashboards, and visualisations ready in near-real-time for the Life & Brand management team to review. It used to take a week to generate management reports; with Sage Intacct, these can be generated within minutes. The platform also enables data to be sliced and diced across dimensions to get different views without producing individual reports.
Says Daniel Smith, Financial Director at Life & Brand Portfolio: “In the hospitality industry, we are under constant pressure to improve efficiencies and drive down costs. Sage Intacct is helping us achieve these goals by automating processes we used to execute manually and putting real-time insights about our business at our fingertips.
“We were impressed by the speed of deployment for Sage Intacct, which AWCape got up and running in just over a month. The ease of integration with our other business systems, the ease of use and how it empowers end-users are also compelling benefits. We’ve been able to create custom dashboards and management reports without needing in-depth training.”
AWCape collaborated with Life & Brand to integrate with its banking transaction feed, automating the allocation of financial transactions to the correct general ledger account. It is also preparing integrations with Life & Brand’s workflow, point of sale and business intelligence systems. This will enable Life & Brand to automate data capture processes that currently require manual intervention.
Jeff Ryan, MD for AWCape, says: “For a growing business like Life & Brand, it can be difficult to get timely insights to the right people if financial information is spread out across disparate spreadsheets or tied up in manual processes. Sage Intacct streamlines reporting so financial teams can save dozens of hours each month, while supporting business leaders with accurate, real-time insights.”
Says Jamie Peers, VP of Business Development and Alliances at Synatic: “Life & Brand is a distributed franchise business with many sources of data. Synatic, along with our valued partner AWCape, was able to seamlessly knit together their POS (point of sale) and workflow systems with Sage Intacct.
“In addition, the Synatic platform was key to automating the allocations of their large number of daily bank transactions within Sage Intacct. This has led to detailed, centralised data being available to finance and executives to gain deep insight into their business. Synatic is very excited by how Life & Brand is continuing to rely on our platform to integrate other systems and proud to have been part of this solution.”
Adds Gerhard Hartman, Vice-President, Medium Business for Sage Africa & Middle East: “Multidimensional accounting is a must for hospitality companies because they often have complex operating models (such as franchising or fractional ownership), as well as multiple stores and brands in their portfolios. Sage Intacct equips them with the real-time business insights they need to make decisions that boost profitability in a competitive sector where margins are tight and cost pressures are relentless. We are pleased to be uniquely and innovatively positioned to help meet our customers' needs.”
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