Intacct Customer Spotlight: Savory Sandwiches, Inc.

This week’s customer in the spotlight is a growing franchise owner that outstretched the capabilities of QuickBooks. Savory Sandwiches owns eight Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches franchises - the second fastest growing restaurant chain in the United States in 2010. Moving to Intacct has allowed Savory Sandwiches to automate key business processes, streamline accounting operations, and perform more sophisticated financial management tasks – all without increasing the size of its finance staff.

As with any franchisor, as you add new locations there is a spike in operating volume, financial complexity, and business risk. For savory Sandwiches, their continued growth created significant challenges for the finance department. Before adopting Intacct, they were using multiple instances of QuickBooks, augmented by Microsoft Excel plus manual and paper processes, to operate the business.

Dave Staker, co-owner of Savory Sandwiches, explains: “When we first started out, QuickBooks was perfect for us. But as we expanded the business, we got to a point where we had stretched beyond what QuickBooks was designed for. As we grew, we found ourselves spending a tremendous amount of time and resources outside of QuickBooks – in Excel and in other manual processes – and we still had a hard time getting the information we needed, when we needed it. We knew we had to make a change to a system that would automate our business and provide real-time visibility across our operations.”

Intacct is really well suited to the needs of multi-location organizations like Savory Sandwiches. With Intacct, each franchise can operate independently, but at the same time franchises can interact with each other and with corporate headquarters. As an example, one franchise can receive consumables for several peer locations, while payments come out of corporate. Each franchise also enjoys real-time visibility into its own performance, while corporate headquarters can both instantly consolidate the entire enterprise or drill down into details for any part of the business.

The ability to do these real-time consolidations was a huge factor in the selection of Intacct and something that delivers a huge ROI for the organization. Stalker noted: “When I saw the ability to automate inter-entity consolidations and eliminations, that’s when I was really blown away. The labor savings from automating financial consolidation, reporting, and inter-entity transactions saves me more annually than the cost of the entire Intacct system.”

Another key benefit from the move to Intacct has been improved visibility into every part of the business through Intacct’s real-time, web-based dashboards, reporting and analytics. In addition to providing more than 150 pre-built reports, Intacct makes it easy for Savory Sandwiches to create additional reports, dashboard, and analyses to meet their specific needs. They can now analyze data using a multi-dimensional approach – such as analyzing profitability by store or by menu item, and can evaluate both operational and financial information, for example to compare revenue per square foot across all of their locations.

“To be successful in a franchise business, it is important to closely manage cash flow and accurately forecast revenue,” explained Stalker. “Intacct provides real-time visibility into our current inflows, outflows, and revenue streams. We can also easily drill down and analyze data to help franchise locations improve their performance. With Intacct, I have a better view of the overall business and can identify problem areas and growth opportunities faster.”

The bottom line from Stalker’s perspective as a franchise owner: “We’re a multi-million dollar operation, with nine separate operating entities, and Intacct enables us to manage all of this using only about one and a half full time finance employees. Between streamlined financial processes, automated consolidation, enhanced real-time reporting, and improved decision-making from better management visibility, Intacct has been an outstanding investment for our business.”

I talk to lots of Intacct customers and the ability to do more without adding resources comes up all the time as a top benefit.

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Want to learn more about how Intacct helps companies that are outgrowing the capabilities of QuickBooks? Be sure to attend a free 45-minute Intacct Product Tour for QuickBooks users on Thursday, February 9, at 1:00pm PT (4:00pm ET). Click here to register.

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