The Cafe Collective is a group of passionate hospitality professionals with one main focus: to do the common things uncommonly well. With over 40 outlets across Australia, they work hard to design, build and operate modern and welcoming food outlets that customers love.
The Cafe Collective are an excellent example of a fast-growing Aussie success story. However like many fast-growing businesses, they found themselves struggling with a number of issues around data access and reporting.
Firstly, they needed in-depth reports from across all their cafes and the various platforms being used in each – in as close to real time as possible. Managers were struggling, for instance, to get accurate data on past sales to use to predict future sales and therefore make correct purchases at a moment’s notice. They also needed to receive alerts for situations like when an employee was not working the legal hours at the correct award rate with the right breaks throughout the day.
Secondly, they needed consolidated reports across their entire business. The Cafe Collective had already chosen three popular and reliable platforms - Kounta, Tanda and Xero - but while these all provided excellent reporting within the apps, it was becoming increasingly difficult to get a bigger picture view across everything. In fact, the team could sometimes spend a whole day putting together a specific report only to have to do it all over again later on for the next reporting period.
With SyncHub, The Cafe Collective found a solution to both of their problems. First, they used our Kounta, Tanda and Xero connectors to bring historical data down into their Power BI reporting dashboards. Next, SyncHub continued to run in the background, keeping the data up to date and providing the real-time reports and notifications which the team so desperately needed.
With SyncHub providing the data, the team could now build the business and make decisions with confidence.
SyncHub has allowed the Cafe Collective to leverage their data in a number of ways. They now have custom dashboards that refresh hourly, meaning the right information is at the fingertips of the people who need it. This goes from the production workers in the kitchens right through to the CEO.
For end-of-month metrics meetings, the team would previously spend an entire week getting spreadsheets together. Now, the information sits in the cloud for anyone to access from anywhere – allowing time to be spent more productively and ensuring greater data integrity.
Franchisees now have a level of insight into their businesses that they never had before. Weekly meetings with cafe managers are now based on up-to-date financial metrics, and they have access to the right information to help them improve in areas like purchasing and product presentation.
As it happens, SyncHub also turned out to be a critical component of the company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. SyncHub allowed them to be notified in real time when staff and product purchases needed to be reduced and when it was time to start gearing up again as sales rose. Observing combined data from across all the Collective’s cafes has even helped the company make decisions around staffing in the head office during the pandemic. Today, as the effects of the pandemic continue, SyncHub remains a crucial part of the Cafe Collective’s decision making.
“SyncHub has allowed us to see week-to-week exactly how much staff and product we need in our stores. As the COVID-19 pandemic was starting, we were able to react very quickly and close stores where needed in order to minimise losses.”
Given the ease with which Kounta, Tanda and Xero may now be reported on, The Cafe Collective is committed to changing all their stores over to this cloud stack. SyncHub has provided the best of both worlds - first class specialist applications in Tanda, Kounta and Xero, with aggregate reporting typically observed only in enterprise-level ERP systems.