Running several branches without losing sight of any of them
What is shared across branches and what stays separate, how a consolidated P&L is built, and the three reports that tell you which location is actually carrying the others.
The first branch runs on memory. You know what is in the fridge, who is late, and roughly what you made last night. The second branch quietly deletes all three of those abilities, and most owners discover this about six weeks in.
What is shared, and what must not be
The rule is simple and worth writing on a wall: share the definitions, separate the facts.
| Shared across branches | Separate per branch |
|---|---|
| Menu, categories, modifiers, combos | Stock levels and stock movements |
| Recipes and plate costs | Cash drawers, shifts and reconciliations |
| Roles and permission levels | Staff rosters, attendance, payroll |
| Tax rules and templates | Orders, refunds and daily sales |
| Chart of accounts | Journal entries, tagged with their branch |
Share stock across branches and you get a number nobody can act on. Separate the menu and you get four versions of the same dish at three prices, and a report that cannot add them up.
Consolidated numbers are built, not merged
A consolidated profit and loss is not a spreadsheet that adds three exports. It works because every journal entry already carries the branch it came from, so the same ledger can be read one site at a time or all at once — with no reconciliation step in between, and no argument about which export was the latest.
That is also what makes the comparison honest. If branch two’s food cost is three points worse than branch one’s, both numbers came from the same recipes and the same stocktake procedure. Otherwise you are comparing two different measurement systems and calling it insight.
The three reports that matter
You do not need a wall of dashboards. You need these, weekly:
- Sales by branch by day. Not the total — the shape. A branch that is flat on Tuesdays has a different problem from one that collapses after 9 p.m.
- Prime cost by branch. Food plus labour as a percentage of that branch’s own sales. This is the single fastest read on whether a site is healthy.
- Discounts, voids and refunds by branch and by user. Not because you expect theft, but because an outlier here is always worth a conversation — usually about training.
If two branches differ on any of these by more than a couple of points, the answer is a procedure, not a person.
Permissions are what make delegation safe
A branch manager needs to run their site without seeing the chain. That is not a courtesy; it is what lets you hire one. The system checks every request against the manager’s own branch, so “look only at your branch” is enforced rather than trusted, and an activity log records who approved what.
The corresponding discipline is yours: resist making a second Admin for convenience. A chain with four people who can change prices and no way to tell which one did has a reporting problem that no software fixes.
Before the second location opens
Three things are much cheaper to fix now than later:
- Write the recipes. Twenty accurate ones. Without them you cannot compare food cost between sites, and food cost is where the difference will show up first.
- Standardise the day-end. Same close, same count, same variance threshold, in both places. Two different closing routines produce two incomparable sets of numbers.
- Decide what a branch manager owns. Ordering? Rostering? Discount authority up to what amount? Decide it before you hire, not during the first argument.
The second branch does not fail because it is a bad location. It fails because the first one was run on things that only existed in the owner’s head.
Run all of this from one system
POS, kitchen, inventory, recipe costing, staff and accounting — connected, and free to start.
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