TouchBistro, which was founded in 2011, is a pioneer of mobile point-of-sale (POS) orders and payments for restaurants. The company’s innovative mobile POS solution was specifically designed for restaurants, providing a more efficient solution to the complex legacy systems and proprietary hardware typically used to manage POS transactions and business processes. Its simple user interface is quick and easy for employees to learn and use, and routine adjustments to menus and daily specials can be performed easily by the manager. The POS also runs on an inexpensive, off-the-shelf iPad that can be taken by the server right to the customer tableside to enter orders that are relayed instantly to the kitchen for preparation without waiters needing to run back and forth to a central server station.

The TouchBistro POS gained rapid acceptance first in Toronto, where the company is headquartered, then the rest of Canada, the U.S., and in markets around the world. Over the past decade, TouchBistro has evolved from a core POS solution to an all-in-one restaurant management system that includes payment processing, online ordering, reservations, marketing and other key functions needed by restaurants. More than 16,000 restaurants are using TouchBistro.

ERP Success Partners stepped in as TouchBistro scaled

As TouchBistro expanded its product portfolio and customer base, the company added more employees and offices. It now has more than 650 team members working from offices in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico. While the majority of TouchBistro revenues are generated in North America, the company has customers located all over the globe.

A NetSuite cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) user since 2015, TouchBistro needed a partner that could help it optimize its use of the ERP platform.

“We needed to scale our finance processes to match the company’s stage of growth,” says Kaitlyn Kastelic, CPA, Controller at TouchBistro. “We turned to ERP Success Partners to help improve our efficiency and level of performance.”

ERP Success Partners set up a NetSuite banking automation module for the company, allowing a direct connection between NetSuite and multiple banking portals. TouchBistro can now use its bank reconciliation software to do uploads from the bank and data integrations with the appropriate banking partners.

“This eliminated the need to export data from NetSuite, manipulate the data in Excel, and then do all these manual updates directly into our banking portal. It’s really made the process more efficient by removing that middle piece,” says Kastelic. “This alone saves us 5-10 hours of work each month.”

Automation and real-time reporting

TouchBistro also needed help sorting out the general ledger (GL) coding so management reports could be easily generated with the information organized according to its C-suite requirements.

“There was no grouping of GL accounts. It would pretty much be each individual cash accounts listed, along with each individual prepaid expense account, and no order to it,” Kastlic explains. She notes that financial statements would get generated for individual GL accounts, rather than mapped in logical groups that would show up automatically in the correct sections on the balance sheet. This made it very time consuming to generate financial reports for management in a way that could be understood and used. For example, if accounting wanted to add a line for property, plant and equipment (PP&E) for computer assets, they would have to map the computers to the PP&E and asset section of the balance sheet. 

ERP Success Partners eliminated this extra work by developing a NetSuite customization that maps the number code for the GL. So if TouchBistro puts in a PP&E account of 1500, anything from 1500 to 1599 would fall into this grouping. This effectively automates the way data gets reported on the financial statement.

“We no longer have to manually update every single report that exists for that GL code,” Kastelic adds. “This has saved us at least another five hours of work each month and allows finance reporting to easily scale as the company continues to grow.”

Processes keep improving, creating greater efficiencies

Most recently, TouchBistro has been working with ERP Success Partners to optimize NetSuite’s prepayments module. The company was managing that process externally and then handling the manual expensing of prepaids over time.

“June was the first month that we handled this process live at month end. We entered that data into NetSuite and it automated the schedules for us,” says Kastelic. “This really helped in terms of efficiency and tracking.”

TouchBistro also recently completed EFT linking to its banking portals. This was a major win for a company that used to have to manually enter vendor payment details into a payment portal every time an invoice was being set for payment. Accounting also had to enter each individual vendor’s banking details and then manually apply each payment to the right invoice. 

Today, the company uploads the invoices into NetSuite, which directly integrates with its banking portals. ERP Success Partners automated both the payment remittance and the payment application (to the specific invoice) processes.

“This saves quite a bit of time on our end, reducing error rates and allows team members to work on other projects,” Kastelic adds.

Full speed ahead

As the company continues to grow and expand its offerings, TouchBistro wants to further optimize NetSuite, find new ways to automate its processes, improve its efficiencies, and reduce the risk of errors.