Month End Used to Be a Build. Now It’s a Review.
Meridian — a restaurant group of eight outlets (name changed)
- 9 → 1
- Nine spreadsheets became one system
- A day → none
- Every month, spent rebuilding the group view by hand
- Every figure
- Opens the invoice it was read from
How it used to work
Eight outlets. Eight spreadsheets. And a ninth the owner rebuilt by hand every month just to see the business as one business.
Outlet 1
Outlet 2
Outlet 3
Outlet 4
Outlet 5
Outlet 6
Outlet 7
Outlet 8
copied by hand · one day · every month
The ninth sheet
the only place the group existed as one business
A tab per month, a row per day, a column per supplier, all typed by hand by eight different managers, and copied into a ninth file every time anyone wanted to see the group as a whole.
A day gone, every month
Transcription, before a single question could be answered.
Stale on arrival
By the time the ninth sheet was built, the outlets had moved on.
Nine files that could disagree
And nothing in any of them saying which one was right.
Numbers you had to take on trust
Checking one meant going and finding the paper it came from.
How it works now
One database behind one app, with the costs that arrive by email recording themselves.
Supplier email
records itself
Daily entry
on a phone
Till
sales, nightly
One database
every figure, once, with the document behind it
Consolidated P&L
already current
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Month end
A day rebuilding it
A review, then close
Recording a cost
Every line typed by a manager
Arrives by email, records itself
Checking a figure
Go and find the invoice
Click it and the invoice opens
Who sees what
Share the file, share everything
A manager sees their outlet only
When it goes wrong
A blank cell, no reason given
It waits in a queue, with the reason
Asking a question
Build a pivot, or ask the sheet’s owner
Ask in plain English, answered in seconds
The truth
Nine files that can disagree
One database that cannot
The consolidated view stopped being a file somebody builds and became a screen that is always right. Nobody had to learn a new app. The team asks questions the way they would ask a bookkeeper, and gets an answer off the live numbers.
Same problem in your business?
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A month, end to end
Every day
on its own, in the outlets- 01InboxCosts record themselvesAutomated
Supplier invoices arriving by email are read and recorded without anyone touching them
- 02EntryFill the gapsHuman
The manager enters only what did not arrive by email, on a phone, in the outlet
- 03QueueNothing fails silentlyAutomated + human
Anything unreadable or unclassified waits in the queue with a reason, instead of disappearing
At month end
what used to be a day of rebuilding- 04ReconcileMatch the monthAutomated
Recorded costs are checked against what the outlets actually sold
- 05CloseReview and closeHuman
The consolidated view is already current, so the month is reviewed and closed, not rebuilt
Three of these run every day and always did. They were just being done by hand, in a spreadsheet. The last two are month end, and month end is where the day went.
See it working
The system itself, not screenshots of it, running on invented data. Click anything.
The back office
The web app the group runs on. Every screen clickable.
- Switch between owner and manager and watch the navigation change
- Eight outlets, one consolidated P&L that is already current
- Open the document behind any automatic figure
- Switch the whole interface to 中文
The automation
What the automation actually is, not a diagram of it.
- The contract between the gateway and the agent
- Four skills, and the tools each one is allowed to call
- The run log, and a week of it played back
Four things are wrong in there. Go and find them.
- 1A quantity on one invoice disagrees with the supplier’s statement. It is the only flagged row that month.
- 2A document nobody has extracted is blocking the close for every outlet at once, because nothing knows yet which outlet it belongs to.
- 3One site agreement expires inside 60 days.
- 4A payroll control is switched off, and says why.
Everything else reconciles cleanly. That is what makes these four legible instead of noise.
What the owner keeps hold of
- Nothing consequential happens without a person approving it.
- A manager reaches their own outlet and nothing else. The other seven never come back to them at all.
- Every automatic figure opens the document behind it, so no number has to be taken on trust.
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