Setting Up Multi-Unit Restaurant Groups in MarginEdge
If you have a multi-unit restaurant group, there are several ways we can set up your company in MarginEdge to best suit your needs.
Scroll down to find a handy PDF guide that can walk you through the decision of whether or not to link your restaurants together in MarginEdge.
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To understand how this works, let’s first cover 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.
- A Concept is used for Restaurant Units that are linked together within a Company.
You may choose to link restaurants together or keep them separate. However, this choice must be made when setting up your restaurant in MarginEdge because we cannot link or unlink restaurant units after they have been set up.
The advantage of linking similar restaurants into a group is that they will be easier to compare and track against each other. Changing settings in one location will mostly automatically update settings in all the other restaurants within the Concept group. There are some limitations: individual restaurants will not be able to customize their units for how they do business or want to see items reported.
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 concept.
Note: In order to use our Commissary Feature or Internal Transfers, your restaurants will need to be linked and share both a "Company" and "Concept" in MarginEdge.
Let’s look at some pros and cons:
- Budget Reports – Restaurants within a Concept will be able to look at their budgets side by side. Restaurant units that are not shared cannot.
- When you first add a budget, it will be created for all units in your Company/Concept. 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 regardless of whether they share concepts.
- The Sales Report that shows the 21-day moving average of sales can be viewed for all restaurant units in your Company regardless of whether they share a Concept.
- Products – Restaurants that share a Concept also share products.
- The advantages of this are that products are called the same thing in every restaurant unit that shares the Concept (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 restaurant unit must use the same count by (e.g., tomatoes cannot be counted by the case at unit A but by the "each" at unit B) and 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 whether they are part of a Concept or not; however, it is important to note that the count by the amount (pounds, case, etc....) will need to be the same between restaurants.
- Recipes – Restaurant units in the same Concept share recipes. This means you will only need to create a recipe at one location, and it will automatically be available at all locations.
- 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 and Internal Transfers features, restaurants MUST share a company concept.