How Word of Mouth keeps its margins honest
Yesterday's sales, every morning
A restaurant, beach bar and music venue group on Ibiza.
- Sector
- Hospitality
- Headquarters
- Santa Eulària des Riu, Ibiza
- Systems connected
- Revolut, the POS, Xero
- Reporting cycle
- Daily sales, weekly margin
The challenge
Sales sat in the bank and the till, per product line: every burger, every bottle of wine, every empanada. Costs sat in a spreadsheet that one person labelled by hand each month. Margin was the number the directors needed weekly for investor and shareholder calls, and it was the number nobody could see until long after the week had gone.
Spanish supplier invoicing makes it harder: handwritten invoices arrive late, so cost data is not dependable until a fortnight after month end. And the person who needs the figures most is rarely at a desk. He runs the business from a phone.
What Mira does
Mira reads the sales as they land and applies cost prices against them, product line by product line, so margin is a question anyone can ask rather than a report somebody has to build. Rolling averages absorb the invoice lag deliberately: this is operational insight in time to act on, not reconciliation-grade accounting.
In Neil's words
Neil Linter is an investor in Word of Mouth and asks Mira about the business every day. We asked him how it has gone.
How do you use Mira day to day?
Every morning I wake up and ask Mira what yesterday's sales were.
Where does it help with the margin?
Mira is helping us make sure we're producing the right margins. It even flags till entries put through as a 'custom amount' and suggests whether they're food or drink, because that all affects our gross margins.
Has it ever caught a mistake?
Mira flagged a couple of big invoices that were sitting in the wrong place, which made our drinks margins look significantly down. It was an error, and our finance manager moved it. It's good to have those checks and balances.
What happens when a number looks wrong?
When I saw how many cancelled and pending orders we had, I asked Mira to look at them in different ways. It showed me the problem was bigger than I first thought, and helped us find which orders had just been moved to another table.
What made it worth having?
It's always nice to have a tool that can measure what you're producing and the accuracy of it, and Mira does that very, very simply.
And for the business overall?
Mira has identified lots of additional revenues.
Run your company on its own numbers.
Half an hour is enough to see Mira running on your own tools, with your own data.
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