Hospitality accounting software

Irish Franchise of the Year 2022 winners, Camile Thai, find opening new restaurants a breeze with AccountsIQ’s franchise accounting software.

The Camile Thai franchise has been keeping Ireland happy with its delicious and healthy ‘good mood Thai food’ since 2010. Since then, they’ve grown to 45 branches and they’re now expanding rapidly in the UK. This phenomenal success was recognised recently when AccountsIQ’s founder and CEO, Tony Connolly, had the pleasure of presenting them with the Franchise of the Year award at the Irish Franchise Association Awards dinner.

Maurice Woulfe, Financial Controller, Camile Thai

“We’ve been using AccountsIQ as our main accounting software for about five years,” says Camile Thai’s Financial Controller, Maurice Woulfe. “We moved from QuickBooks because we were growing so fast. AccountsIQ facilitates growth; we can add new restaurants and still consolidate monthly. It’s all really easy.”

A single finance platform for the entire franchise

AccountsIQ’s software suits a franchise business model because every franchisee can use the same Cloud-based system.

“Each restaurant has its own database,” explains Maurice. “I guess like other companies might have departments, we have a separate database for each restaurant. But, because AccountsIQ is Cloud-based, they’re all integrated and can talk to each other. That’s crucial for us because we need complete visibility across the network.”

Making life easier for franchisees

Rolling out AccountsIQ to new Camile Thai franchisees is quick and easy and brings significant benefits.

“We always encourage new franchisees to use AccountsIQ,” says Camile Thai’s Financial Accountant, Eoghain Grant. “We can set them up and transfer the business ownership very quickly. In fact, it’s ready right out of the box. We don’t need to configure anything; our franchisees just read the help file and they’re ready to go with it.”

The head office finance team benefits from the multi-dimensional reporting

Ease of use is essential for franchisees, as they’re not normally trained accountants. But Camile Thai’s head office finance team are also enjoying the benefits of using AccountsIQ.

“Our business model is complex,” says Maurice. “But AccountsIQ gives us full visibility.”

Camile Thai’s finance team uses the multi-dimensional reporting to drill down to a full P&L for each restaurant and to produce consolidated monthly reports for their management team.

“AccountsIQ is a big timesaver at month end,” says Maurice. “It’s much easier than doing consolidation in Excel; it’s more user friendly and we have fewer errors. The user-friendly FX functionality is also important now that we’re growing fast in the UK.”

Integration with MarketMan is a huge bonus

Camile Thai have worked with the AccountsIQ team to integrate their finance system with MarketMan (a restaurant inventory management system). This will give them even more granular financial business intelligence information.

“It’s so important to us that AccountsIQ integrates with MarketMan,” says Eoghain. “It means we’ll have detailed information on everything from our stock levels to our most profitable dishes, and we’ll be able to do profit level variance analysis.”

Maurice and Eoghain are confident that integrating AccountsIQ and MarketMan will also make life easier for their restaurant managers.

“They’ll only have to use one system,” says Maurice. “They won’t have any manual invoice entry or duplications to do. But in the background all the data will go into AccountsIQ.”  

“We love using AccountsIQ,” adds Eoghain. “And I’m delighted with the way the integration’s worked. The AccountsIQ team were super-responsive; they helped us to map out what we needed and worked around our schedule to keep the project on track.”

In summary, Camile Thai have found AccountsIQ to be extremely well-suited to running the finances of a complex and growing franchise.

“It makes life so much easier,” concludes Maurice. “It’s Cloud-based so you don’t need a lot of processing power; you can run it on a small laptop in a restaurant.

There are no issues with upgrades because they’re done automatically. You also don’t need to be an experienced accountant to use it and you don’t need an IT person to install it. We just send our restaurant managers a link, they open it, job done!”

Established in 1997, Insomnia Coffee Company has grown at a phenomenal rate, with over 120 stores in operation and continued expansion into the UK. Currently rolling out a number of high street franchise stores, Insomnia needed hospitality accounting software solution that would allow for integration with their current EPOS and retail systems as well as providing in-depth sales analysis.

Insomnia needed a strong retail accounting software solution that could support the launch of their High Street Franchise initiative. They also wanted an in-depth breakdown of sales per item per store which would allow them to monitor performance and easily analyse best performing stores and products.

Insomnia initially looked at buying an on-premise accounting package and the required servers and infrastructure but they had little access to local IT support. Fortunately AccountsIQ was recommended to them and we were able to implement a full cloud retail accounting solution at a fraction of the cost of installing an on-premise solution.

We are impressed with the reporting capabilities of AccountsIQ, and with the support we got from the AccountsIQ team in implementing the new system.

A cloud solution makes so much sense for a multi-location business like ours. We now have a strong foundation on which to manage and grow our operations and develop our franchise model, while maintaining tight control. Barry Kehoe, Chief Financial Officer, Insomnia Coffee Company

The Solution

Insomnia chose to adopt AccountsIQ accounting software for all its financial requirements because of its extensive functionality consisting of:

• Full featured accounting system
• Full EPOS integration capabilities
• Ability to report by location, individual product and store
• Transaction upload via excel

Key Benefits

• Cloud based system allowing for concurrent logins.
• Simply monthly fee with no upfront capital cost on local servers etc
• Strong sales and profitability reporting – no need to export to Excel or re-key anything.
• Extensive cloud accounting functionality meeting their requirements but with a system than can grow with them.
• Integration with their EPOS system
• Departmental reporting