Plugging revenue leakage of 4.5% for a restaurant chain running 120 outlets

The company is a leading restaurant chain that operates 120 outlets at different locations across the country.  It receives about 0.5 million orders a month across all these outlets.  Half of these orders are received from food delivery aggregators and the other half are dine-in and take-away orders.  The company has a agreement with the food delivery aggregators with a certain fee.  For the dine-in and take-away orders, customers pay through various modes such as credit cards, UPI, wallets or even cash.  The cash gets deposited by the outlets into the company's bank account every day whereas the amount received through the other modes gets credited to the bank through payment gateways. The company uses a POS system with terminals at each outlet and a central accounting system.

In order to ascertain that the collections against all orders, net of charges, is credited to the bank, the CFO's office of the company needs to carry out a reconciliation every day between the transactions as per the POS system and the third-party reports from food delivery aggregators, payment gateways and the cash reports from the outlets.  Additionally, the charges deducted by the third-parties need to be validated and the residual credit needs to be verified with the bank statement.  This is an extremely time-consuming task due to the volumes involved.  In the absence of such reconciliation, a complete "revenue assurance" cannot be generated.  Another issue is that the industry is prone to frauds and embezzlements.   

The restaurant chain deployed Reconcify, which automated the entire process end-to-end as per the steps below:

1.  Downloading transaction report from the POS system as well as the portals of the food delivery aggregators and payment gateways.

2.  Reconciling the transaction and validating the charges levied by the third-party platforms.

3.  Reconciling the receivables with the credits to the bank account.

4.  Passing summary entries at day-end in the accounting system.

1.  Prior to the deployment of Reconcify, the company had engaged a team of 6 accountants to carry out these reconciliations. With Reconcify, these 6 accountants were freed up to perform other important activities.  This turned out to be extremely beneficial for the company which was already struggling due to staff crunch.

2.  During peak months, order volumes saw a massive surge, which made it even more difficult for the team to complete the reconciliations in a timely manner.  Reconcify is completely scalable and works with the same degree of efficiency regardless of transaction volumes.

3.  The CFO's office now has a complete control over collections received from the food delivery aggregators, payment gateway and the cash collections at the outlets. The time required to close the books reduced from 12 days to 3 days.

4.  The company was able to plug revenue leakages worth 4.5% post the deployment of Reconcify and also eliminate the chances of fraud and embezzlements through tighter controls.