THINK OF YOUR ACCOUNTANT AS A FINANCIAL SYSTEMS ADVISOR FOR YOUR BRAND

As you make changes to your operations to survive the pandemic, you need to keep your accountant fully in the loop.

BY MICHAEL RASMUSSEN

Q A

What role should my accountant play in my restaurant, beyond keeping up with the numbers?

Don’t just think of your accountant as a numbers person. Think of that person as the financial systems advisor for your brand. And don’t just think of your pizzeria as a business. Think of it as a brand; even if you own just one store, it’s still a brand, no different than a national franchise that’s been around for 30 years. Always think of it as a brand and promote it as a brand, since that is what creates your identity.

For most customers, eating out requires an entirely new decision process during the pandemic. They have to determine which pizza brand offers a safe dine-in experience or the best takeout and delivery options. With or without a pandemic, your brand needs to create a consistent experience to the greatest extent possible, and when you have to change that experience, this must be communicated both externally (to your customers) and internally (to your employees). But there’s someone else who needs to know: your accountant.

When pizzeria owners picture their relationship with their accountant, they see themselves dropping off a box of materials at the latter’s office and just walking away. You receive a financial report and a tax return at the end of the year, but what about financial updates throughout the year?

On any given Tuesday at 10 p.m., how can you know what your financials look like? And with the pandemic still going on, your CPA also should be instrumental in providing any documentation required for SBA loans or grants you’ve received while leading the charge in new tax strategies.

If you have modified your brand to tweak your sales mix of delivery, takeout, dine-in or catering, your accounting reports need to be adjusted to properly reflect this new activity. You also will want to start generating new key performance indicators to help gauge your progress. These need to be adopted in your new modified brand immediately. And if you are a franchisor with multiple owners, you need to institute a mandate requiring those owners to monitor progress more frequently than in the past. This means your accounting team needs to be up to date on any changes in your company and fully prepared to get the right numbers to the owners.

Again, your pizzeria is a brand, whether you’re a single-unit operator or a franchisor with 100 stores. You need to put systems in place that can be measured, especially if you have modified your operations since the pandemic started in early 2020. With dine-in capacity limited, you need to monitor your efforts daily and weekly—which will probably be more frequently than you’re accustomed to. There is no room for errors when the economy is so fluid—what works this week might not work next week. It’s of paramount importance to get your brand’s systems in place by working closely with your accountant.

The accountant’s job is to give restaurant owners a system in which they feel comfortable and in control of their numbers, knowing those numbers are accurate and that they have an experienced accountant behind them whenever they feel like they’re in over their heads. By building relationships with our clients and always maintaining a positive attitude, we accountants provide a great contact point for any questions or issues related to your financial systems. When the owner feels in control and has constant access to their books, they can make informed, timely decisions about how to manage their business.

In conclusion, to strengthen your restaurant as a brand, your accountant needs to be involved in all aspects of your business and made aware of any and all changes to your brand and your operations. And in addition to preparing financial statements, they should assist you in compiling timely data to send to banks or third parties, like the SBA, for loan documentation or tax credit programs. Timely accounting data is critical during these times and must be made available securely.

Because if your phones and web ordering are down, you may as well send everyone home. We become your phone company and provide a backup Internet connection

IP Phone Service

Increase revenue and lower cost

• No Busy Signals

• Call Recording

• Call Queuing / Auto-Answering

• Multiple (random) start-of-call upsell messages

• On-hold music/message loops

• Detailed reports—hold times, lost calls etc

• Callerid delivered to POS system

• Auto-attendants—”If you have arrived for curbside pickup press one”

Cellular Backup Internet Protect against outages

• When your Internet fails our cellular backup router keeps your phones, credit card processing and web orders all working.

• The backup kicks in automatically in seconds. So quickly you will not even drop calls in progress when your primary Internet goes down!

• The same router can be used to create chainwide virtual private network to connect your locations.

• SD-WAN LTE/LTE-A (4G/5G) modems.

Ask us how we can make your life easier and improve your customer ’s experience during these difficult times. Our rapid response support team averaged almost 500 custom changes per week in April-June. As “the rules” changed for our clients, we updated messaging and call flow to minimize impact, maximize revenue. Let PizzaCloud do the same for your stores.

Maintain control, and get the calls off the front counters. For a small chain all you need is a large office at one location. Cut labor hours up to 50% and/or shift labor to lower cost regions while increasing average ticket . Eliminate the constantly ringing phones at the front counters! Tight integration allows calls to overflow to stores, so you can choose when to staff the call center.

The same tight integration, same detailed reports and call recordings in your hands, same ability to overflow back to the stores, but you let some one else hire and manage the staff. We can provide this service to you or work with your existing call center provider.

If you have any interest in call centers call us to discuss options or visit www.pizzacloud.net to register for a webinar.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL? GHOST DINERS!

Forget ghost kitchens—the dining room at Trattoria Da Luigi is haunted, but these spirits don’t want to scare anyone. They just want to keep diners separated at a safe social distance during the coronavirus pandemic. Luigi Cutraro, owner of the Royal Oak, Michigan, restaurant, credits his wife, Teresa, for the idea of mixing guest seating with ghost seating to enforce the 6’ rule. Every other table is occupied by spectral seat-fillers, consisting of white sheets draped around the chairs and broomsticks with balls for heads. Every ghost has a face, and some sport mustaches or wear sunglasses. Cutraro also featured food specials that only a ghost could love, such as the Calamari alla Casper and Braised Short Ribs alla Beetlejuice. “Our aim is to go above and beyond to keep our diners safe,” Cutraro told the Detroit Free Press, one of several media outlets that spotlighted the spooky diningroom ploy. “But we wanted to do it in a way that was really playful, so they can relax and enjoy their dining experience.”

Running On Empty

If the sight of an empty wine bottle makes you sad, cheer up: It will get you a dollar off your next pie at Angeli’s Pizzeria in Baltimore. The restaurant announced in a mid-June post on Facebook that it would award food discounts to anyone who brought in empty bottles for recycling. Fifteen bottles earn the customer a free large cheese pizza. The promotion started after the city announced it was suspending its recycling program. Since Angeli’s works with a private recycling company, owners Juniet and Mert Ozturk saw an opportunity to help customers reduce their carbon footprint. Good deeds are essential to the Ozturks’ mission in Charm City; Maryland State Senator Bill Ferguson even named the Ozturks “community heroes” in late May for providing nearly 2,000 pizzas to 8,000 frontline healthcare workers since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.