Setting Up Multi-Unit Restaurant Groups in MarginEdge
If you have a multi-unit restaurant group, we want you to understand the ways that your data will (and won't) interact with other units in your company.
Let’s recap some basic terminology we use at MarginEdge:
- Company is our term for the overarching category that includes every restaurant you have in MarginEdge.
- Restaurant Unit is used for each individual restaurant location.
Restaurant Units that share the same Company are easier to compare and track against each other. Changing settings in one location will generally automatically update settings in all the other restaurants within the Company. There are some limitations though, which we will cover.
One way to think about it is to understand that the behavior of your products in MarginEdge is unique to each restaurant. Each restaurant will have their own purchase history, latest price, and may be inventoried (or not) at the restaurant's discretion. They may choose to use (or not) recipes and can even restrict recipes to only be visible at certain restaurants. But a tomato's basic configuration (name, report by unit, category) will be shared by all the restaurants when the units share a Company.
Let’s Look at the Details
- Budget Reports – Restaurants will be able to look at their budgets side by side.
- When you first add a budget, it will be created for all units in your Company. You can then edit the budget in each unit.
- If you edit the categories, the change will flow to all units. However, editing a budget % or $ amount in one unit will not change the % or $ in other units. To change a target % in all units at once, you can either remove and recreate the budget, or edit the budget in each unit individually.
- Sales Reporting – Companies can opt to receive sales emails either individually or have all units in one email.
- The Sales Report that shows the 21-day moving average of sales can be viewed for all restaurant units in your Company.
- The Sales Report that shows the 21-day moving average of sales can be viewed for all restaurant units in your Company.
- Products – Restaurants that share a Company also share products.
- The advantages of this are that products are called the same thing in every restaurant unit (e.g., garbanzo beans in unit A cannot be called chickpeas at unit B). This makes detecting variations in pricing for the same item between vendors easier and faster. It also makes reporting transfers between restaurants easier and more accurate.
- Sharing products, however, means that each product must be categorized the same way at all locations (e.g., limes cannot be reported to the kitchen at unit A and to the bar at unit B). In this scenario, it becomes easy to have “too many cooks in the kitchen” so we recommend that Restaurant Admin access be limited to one or two people to avoid confusion and error.
- Inventory – Each restaurant will be able to create their own inventory count sheets. You can send us a request to have a Count Sheet you created at one unit be copied over to another unit just to ease the set up process. And you can also make use of the multi-unit order guide set up to keep things organized.
- Recipes – When a recipe is created at one unit, it will automatically be available in all other units
in the Company.
- You have the ability to restrict recipes to certain locations if there are ones that are only relevant to a particular restaurant unit and you don’t want them visible across all locations.
- The price of each recipe’s ingredients will be specific to the restaurant location. The Menu Price in recipes will be shared amongst the Concept, but in Menu Analysis, the Menu Item Price becomes specific to the restaurant location again.
- There is a special Role called Sous-Chef with the same permissions as a User, plus some extra abilities around Recipes. Sous-chefs can create or edit recipes for their restaurant (but cannot share them with other locations without Restaurant Admin permission).
- Internal Transfers and Commissary - To use our Commissary Feature or Internal Transfers, all restaurant units must share a Company.
- Bill Pay - You have the option to enable a Company-wide view which can allow you to make all payments from one location, rolling them up into one check per vendor.
- Reporting - You can view the P&L from multiple units side by side and export the aggregated data.
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To see more tips and tricks for multi-unit features, please see this article: