How The Café Collective integrates data for better decision making

Collecting and analysing data allows business owners to better understand the dynamics of their business, anticipate sticky points and manage risks. Rather than “going with their gut”, managers can make evidence-based decisions to improve efficiency, risk management and profits.

Most businesses know this and collect huge amounts of data, however due to disparate systems which don’t always connect with each other, most of this information isn’t readily accessible. This means good reporting is possible in a particular area (e.g. from a finance or HR system) but getting insights from across the whole business is still a challenge. And that holistic view is what’s really needed to make good decisions.

Finding a way to integrate data across platforms is essential to get that big picture view of what’s happening in a company. By integrating data from three of their cloud-based systems, that’s exactly what the team at The Café Collective managed to do.

A family-owned business, The Café Collective runs over 40 cafes and a roastery across Australia. With four brands and a number of franchises, the Café Collective needed to not just see integrated data across the whole business, but also for individual sites. Brothers David and Adrian Mulé run the collective together and believe in a data-driven approach to management.

The Café Collective is using SyncHub to integrate its data, and thankfully its three major SaaS applications all play well as modern data-distribution platforms: Kounta, (a hospitality point-of-sale system), Tanda (staffing and rostering) and Xero (finance and accounts). While each of those systems allow good reporting from their systems, integrating and analyzing all the data in Power BI gave David and Adrian a global view of their business. This helps them to make informed decisions about how they can best deploy resources and support the cafes in the collective.

Accessible information when needed

With distributed sites and franchised stores, it’s important for cafe managers and franchise owners to have access to the information they need to run their businesses effectively. David and Adrian can now run reports from different databases and systems for different cafes, and access cafe sales, wages and cost of goods data in close to real time.

“We have custom dashboards that refresh hourly and the right information is at the fingertips of the people who need it. This goes from the production workers in kitchens right through to the CEO,” says David.

These dashboards provide managers with access to all their sales, COGS and wages data to help them make decisions and know that the business is running on schedule.

“Our weekly meetings with cafe managers are a lot more focused on up-to-date financial metrics, and we have access to the right information to help them improve.”

This level of information is also invaluable to franchise owners. “We can give our franchisees a level of insight into their businesses that they never had before, in an easy to understand manner,” says David.

Supporting better decision making – even in uncertain times

By comparing the wage metrics from Tanda with the sales from Kounta and the purchases from Xero, managers have the information they need for day-to-day rostering and purchasing. The company also uses past sales to predict future sales and help to inform managers’ purchasing decisions.

“Our business is quite seasonal so often managers need to know what sales were six months ago at a moment’s notice,” says David.

Having a global insight into their business has also been also crucial during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through integrated reporting, David and Adrian can see exactly how exactly how much staff and product they need in their cafes on a week-to-week basis.

“As the pandemic was starting, we were able to react very quickly in order to minimise losses,” says David. “We have been able to see when we needed to cut back and when it was time to start gearing up again.” 

The importance of data distribution

This level of reporting requires more than just an aggregator like SyncHub.  It is also essential that the data sources can accurately and efficiently expose their data in a manner which is capable of being read at scale and kept up to date in real-time.

Thankfully, with Kounta, Tanda and Xero, The Café Collective had no problems integrating their data.  This level of accessibility and flexibility is by no means prevalent in the SaaS industry, but it is an essential part of a modern, connected business ecosystem. Soon, cloud platforms that do not support this data-distribution movement will simply be left behind.

For The Café Collective, integrating data across different platforms has been vital in giving them the big picture information they need to make good business decisions. In fact, given the ease with which Kounta, Tanda and Xero may now be reported on, The Café Collective is committed to changing all their cafes over to this cloud stack.