Kelsey Davis, a corporate systems analyst with Texas Roadhouse, believes in constant learning. And when it comes to her brand’s emerging third-party delivery business, and resulting reconciliation needs, she wanted to learn from Chick-fil-A, she told the audience at the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference.
Kelsey Davis, corporate systems analyst at Texas Roadhouse
“We are teaming up with Chick-fil-A later this month to learn from them on how they’ve got their reconciliation going,” she told moderator Cheryl Levesque of Forvis Maxras during the panel, which also included Stephanie Sisel and Kristin Mana of KBP Brands. “Texas Roadhouse does not currently offer third-party delivery widespread. It is limited to mostly our fast food brand and the Texas Roadhouse in New York City. That’s going to be a big project for us for 2025. We will be vetting that data, seeing exactly what we need from our providers. What do we need to work on and change in our processes? What can we build? I’m hoping with the help of what we’ve got going and what Chick-fil-A can share with us, that we will have the right tools to get up the third-party delivery mountain.”
Third-party delivery service comes with distinct financial reconciliation hurdles stemming from inconsistencies among delivery platforms, bank transactions, and point-of-sale systems. This requires brands to devise a process to reconcile this data on a daily basis. This often involves resource-intensive reconciliations completed in Excel where the majority of time is spent extracting and matching the transactions with less time spent on researching issues. Many restaurants invest in solutions that automate the financial reconciliation process, some even going from manual to automated methods.
Stephanie Sisel, vice president of operational accounting at KBP Brands, which boasts KFC in its roster, sang the praises of its provider, Trintech.
“We used to do reconciliation using Excel. But Excel was only good at telling us where the difference lied on a particular store for a particular date, but then our process would pull the data and start to figure out why it doesn’t match. So by using the transaction matching software in Trintech, we’re able to get directly to a transaction easily if it doesn’t match, and then we can see why it doesn’t match,” she said. “Just in our testing we’ve been able to identify that we have a different tax rate in our point-of-sale system versus our mobile delivery app in certain stores and that’s something we can correct at the store level so they both match.”
Stephanie Sisel, VP of operational accounting at KBP Brands
Sisel loves that matching function of Trintech. “We’re able to put a lot of match rules in there. It can be at the point-of-sale date at the store level. We’ve also put in the last four digits of a credit card, which should match the credit card processor file. All of those things. The match is going to do an automatic reconciliation of that. But then we go on and become less specific with those match rules, to capture additional matches that should be occurring. Maybe it’s just based on transaction, date, time, and amount. Just within our environment for two brands, we’ve set up over 100 rules.”
She pointed out the challenges of handling reconciliation when accommodating third-party delivery providers and multiple point-of-sale systems.
“We have four point-of-sale systems. The markup between what you see as the sale price in the store versus what you see on the delivery service provider websites. So with DoorDash or Uber Eats, that markup is included in three of our point of sale systems that we work with, but not the fourth. So we had to take that piece of information into consideration as we built out our reconciliation,” Sisel said. “You really have to understand your data before you get in the weeds of building out a solution.”
Davis said that having the right reconciliation tool can pay big dividends in emancipated staff time.
“We can put the effort and the time and the hours towards the higher dollar amounts, or getting back to the stores, who may be having bigger issues with dropping their cash or making sure they’re depositing in the POS correctly,” she said. “Having the time and the resources and the subject matter experts to be able to put other reconciliations in place in our software, we were able to save, just in one project alone, 75 hours a month in our accounting department for our single orders, comparing our ordering to our actual invoices. That was 75 hours just on that one reconciliation that we did per month.”
Sisel closed the session with a dash of common sense.
“Reconciliation is only as good as the data that you put into it. Anything that we have learned throughout our process literally took us back to the beginning of the data that we put in,” she said.
The Restaurant Finance & Development Conference, presented by the Restaurant Finance Monitor, Franchise Times and Food On Demand, was held November 11-13 at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas.
