| Sector | Multi-shop hospitality and retail groups |
|---|---|
| Common problems | Each site closes differently, lodgement worked out by hand, no comparable group view, wages and expenses tracked separately |
| Oxus built | Reckon, live back-office software for multi-shop groups |
| Typical fix | Standardise the daily close, derive the lodgement automatically, report shop against shop |
| Starts with | A free operational audit |
| Area served | Ireland |
What changes when you open the third shop
A single shop does not have a back-office problem. The manager counts the till, writes the figures in a book, works out the lodgement, and the owner reviews it at the weekend. It is not sophisticated, but it is completely adequate, because one person can hold the whole business in their head.
That stops being true somewhere around the third or fourth site. Not because the work gets harder, but because it gets inconsistent. Each shop develops its own conventions: what counts as a float, how a shortfall is written down, whether a staff meal is recorded at all. None of these are wrong. They are simply different, and different is fatal to comparison.
The owner is now doing a job that did not exist before: converting four incompatible records into one view, by hand, after the fact.
The specific problems
- The lodgement is calculated by a tired person. At the end of a long shift, in a hurry. It is the single step most likely to be wrong and the one that matters most to the bank reconciliation.
- Over and short have no history. Everyone knows one site runs short more often, but nobody can prove it or see the pattern, because the figures live in four different books.
- Non-cash information goes uncaptured. Hours worked, supplier deliveries, certificate renewals. All known on the day by the person on site, all reconstructed weeks later by somebody else.
- Comparisons are projects. "Is Tuesday trade down on last year?" should be a question. In most groups it is an afternoon.
- Month end rebuilds the month. Days spent turning receipts, messages and memory back into figures that already existed at the time.
What Oxus does about it
Standardise the close
Every site closes the same way: float, denomination counts, over/short. Consistency is what makes every downstream comparison possible, and it costs the managers nothing because they were already counting.
Derive the lodgement
The bank lodgement is calculated from the close automatically rather than worked out by hand. Small automation, outsized effect.
Keep the whole day together
Driver hours, wages, supplier expenses and document expiry captured alongside the takings, by the person who was there, on the day.
Report across the group
Shop against shop, on demand, without anyone assembling it.
The software we built for this
Oxus Technologies built and operates Reckon, the back office for multi-shop hospitality and retail groups. It is live and in daily use. Reckon closes every till with float and denomination counts and over/short, derives the bank lodgement automatically, keeps driver hours, wages, supplier expenses and document expiry alongside it, and reports group-wide, shop against shop.
Where a group already runs a POS or accounting system it wants to keep, the answer is often systems integration rather than replacement.
Where to start
Start with a free operational audit. We will look at how one of your sites closes, compare it to another, and show you what the inconsistency is costing you.
Frequently asked questions
At what point does a group need back-office software?
Usually at the third or fourth site. One shop can be managed on paper because the owner sees everything. Two is manageable. By four, each site has developed its own way of recording the close, and the owner is no longer reading figures but reconciling formats.
Does this replace our accounting package?
No. An accounting package records what happened once somebody has established what happened. This covers the step before: the daily operational close at each site, where cash is counted, the over/short is established and the lodgement is prepared. Those two layers complement each other, and can be connected so figures move across automatically.
Why record denominations rather than just a total?
Because a recurring discrepancy has a pattern, and the pattern is invisible if all you record is a final figure. Denomination counts let you see whether a shortfall is a systematic issue or a one-off, which is the difference between a process problem and an incident.
Can it handle wages and supplier expenses too?
Yes, and it should. The manager who counts the till is the same person who knows what hours were worked and which supplier delivered what. Capturing all of it in the same close means the day is recorded once. Reckon keeps driver hours, wages, supplier expenses and document expiry alongside the takings.
We have shops with very different formats. Does that break it?
No, but it does need deciding deliberately. Sites can differ in what they record while still agreeing on how the common parts are recorded. Establishing that shared definition is part of what the operational audit is for.