Five Guys - Bank Reconciliation Case Study

An ever-expanding fast food franchise that needed to automate their cash, credit card and online sales.

Five Guys are a fast food company founded in 1986 in Washington, DC. Five Guys are rapidly expanding their number of outlets in Europe and the UK marketplace through franchising. Due to the speed of this growth, their manual systems became time-consuming and too cumbersome to process the increasing daily volumes.

Five Guys needed automation to help deal with the increasing volumes. The Senior Management Accountant in Five Guys had personally seen how Cashbook had helped another fast-food franchise, TGI Friday’s. Based on her previous experience, she proposed Cashbook as a system that would work with the bank statement files and credit card files of Five Guys.

Challenge

Prior to the Cashbook implementation, Five Guys were struggling with:

The creation of 3 separate Bookkeepers for the extraction of General Ledger data for Cash Sales, Credit Card Sales & Online Sales. These formed the GL side of the Reconciliation.
Creation of formats to upload daily bank statement and credit card files. From the uploaded files, Cashbook created Bank Journals and these formed the Bank side of the Reconciliation.
Five Guys only made 3 lodgements per week – Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
Lodgement time delays meant that the sum of two to three days of sales was being reconciled against their single days sales recorded in the GL.
Lodgement references were not consistent amongst the individual stores.

Solution

Cashbook

A Cashbook Consultant always works closely with the client’s finance team in every project we do to help capture their particular business requirements. With this effort from both parties and the Cashbook Technical Department, unique Reconcilers (or Matching Rules) were created to auto-reconcile both sets of data.

How was this achieved?

One-to-One automatic match based on Amount and Reference field.
One (Bank) to Many (Cash) matching was performed automatically based on total of Net amounts by value date & reference field.
Amounts that were slightly different matched, and gave an automatic write off created within pre-defined tolerance levels.
‘Pattern Expression’ and ‘String Format Expression’ were added to Reconcilers to enhance the extraction and matching of data.
This enhancement allowed the matching rules to identify specific data entry e.g. run a rule over data going back five days but skipping the first two days.
Other Reconcilers used were, Summed Match & Many to Many.

Complete Transformation of the Bank Rec process

Increasing the automation of bank reconciliations.
Massively reducing time spent on bank reconciliation processes.
Improving Treasury visibility on the businesses cash flows.
Increasing financial control by doing reconciliations daily rather than monthly.
Automate the creation of bank account fees and charges.
Creating banking fees/charges directly linked to individual stores for better
Improving security on journals posted and reconciliations.
Delivering more timely feedback to store managers on their banking information.
Giving better assurance to the business that Audits are now more easily passed.

RESULTS

Over 75% of all transactions are now auto reconciled.

50% reduction in resources that were previously assigned to Bank Reconciliation.

Since the project went Live, Five Guys have expanded the franchise by over 75 stores.

In my previous role at TGI Friday’s, we used Cashbook for our Bank Reconciliation process. I knew immediately that Cashbook would be a great fit for Five Guys, and the time saving benefits it would bring. It also meant our staff could be moved to higher value functions.

Stephanie Searl, Senior Management Accountant, Five Guys.

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