Ken Rosebury is the (former) Executive Director of the award-winning franchise, the Cheesecake Shop. Founded in Australia in 1991, the franchise has expanded to encompass over 200 individual Cheesecake Shop bakeries throughout Australia and New Zealand—meaning that Ken is all too familiar with the trials and tribulations of manual consolidated reporting.
“Trying to analyse the profit and loss statements of 200 cheesecake shops every month is really an impossible task,” he says ruefully.
What makes the job manageable however is Spotlight Multi, our reporting tool designed specifically for large groups and franchises. Ken uses the Xero integration to import data from all 200-over entities “in a matter of minutes”, and creates informative reports that can be used to drive change across the franchise.
“There was nothing else that we looked at that could cope with the importing of data from a cloud-based accounting software,” says Ken.
Spotlight Multi’s ability to produce ranking tables is particularly useful for a large group like the Cheesecake Shop. Ken can see at a glance which stores have the highest cost of goods, and which have the lowest, allowing the management team to pinpoint issues, problems, and a need for support.
The reports generated are also fantastic for reporting upward to the board, he says, as they give a graphic snapshot of the performance of the whole group, rather than unengaging and difficult-to-decipher raw data.
“They really highlight which stores are above or below these critical levels,” says Ken. “We can respond scientifically in terms of what's occurring in our business in a much more timely way. And that saves us a substantial amount of money.”
Finally, Ken found the process of working with the Spotlight Multi team incredibly beneficial. As a large network of entities in the hospitality industry, the Cheesecake Shop had specific reporting needs that Spotlight Multi was able to cater to through the creation of custom templates.
“The team at Spotlight helped us to quickly design the custom reports that we wanted to see for our network, put it all together for us, and made the whole experience very easy,” says Ken. “Spotlight Multi has made reporting and analysis for us a piece of cake.”
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