Café Ficelle + COGS-Well + SpotOn: The Trifecta of Success

Café Ficelle is a family-owned and operated French bakery and café with four locations across Southern California. Born from a special love for France, their vision was to bring a slice of that culture home and create a place where the community could experience the flavors, traditions, and simple joys of French-inspired cuisine. 

As the business expanded, COO Brenton Woodruff knew they needed the right tools to control inventory, streamline ordering, manage the front-of-house, and keep costs under control. 

Brenton wanted two best-in-class systems rather than an all-in-one solution that was likely to have limited capabilities. That’s when Café Ficelle turned to COGS-Well for restaurant inventory and recipe management and SpotOn for their POS system. 

 

How COGS-Well Helps Café Ficelle Manage Inventory, Orders, Transfers, and Beyond 

Before COGS-Well, Café Ficelle had no system for tracking what was received, calculating inventory on hand, or costing recipes. COGS-Well gave Brenton and his team the ability to manage invoices, ordering, counts, and reporting across multiple sites – all in one place. 

Café Ficelle previously had multiple locations ordering from a commissary with no system for managing the process.

“With COGS-Well, we are now using the inventory transfer features between the commissary and each of the restaurants. The managers place their orders as a transfer request, and the commissary receives alerts for transfers to be fulfilled, and that's super seamless,” Brenton explained. 

Brenton also uses COGS-Well to guide managers on where to order from, ensuring consistency across Café Ficelle’s brand. 

“They're placing purchase orders through COGS-Well for almost all of our vendors.” 

Flexibility is also built in. Whether it’s temporary vendor changes or commissary transfers, COGS-Well adjusts to different workflows. 

“Ordering is simple and seamless. If I want to change a vendor for a couple of weeks because they've got a special going on, I can just change the assigned vendor. And when managers go to order something, it just goes to the new vendor,” Brenton explained. 

One of the biggest benefits for Café Ficelle has been the flexibility and ease of use that COGS-Well provides. Managers can count inventory on a tablet or worksheet, place purchase orders through the system, and transfer items between locations with just a few clicks. 

The system also simplifies invoice management and accounting processes.  

“All of our invoices are automatically received from our vendors, or our restaurants have a desktop scanner that sends them to COGS-Well,” Brenton said. 

“Before COGS-Well, we were just putting in a full invoice amount into QuickBooks,” he added. “COGS-Well does a line item read of all of the invoices, then posts the invoice data that goes into QuickBooks for us. We just scan the data.” 

“Our ability to see what's going on daily with COGS-Well has been great. You'd have the benefit with one, but especially for multiple locations, it has been awesome in terms of inventory management, ordering, and everything else,” Brenton said. 

"You'd have the benefit with one, but especially for multiple locations."

COGS-Well also gives Café Ficelle powerful tools to manage costs and streamline purchasing across multiple locations. 

“The biggest thing that we watch for across the four locations is inventory item price changes. We look at the cost alerts on our dashboard daily,” Brenton said. “I can also see if managers are buying anything off-menu, if something got subbed, or if there have been changes in vendors,” he added. 

How SpotOn Benefits Multi-Location Operations 

Before SpotOn, Café Ficelle had trouble managing multiple locations on the front-of-house side and daily tasks like credit card processing. 

According to Brenton, “We looked at five or six systems before landing on SpotOn. The reporting and ability to manage multiple locations very easily and seamlessly were what sold us on their system. It's simple to roll things out and keep everything the same across the company.” 

Brenton praised SpotOn for being incredibly easy to learn and work with. 

“I call SpotOn 'the great equalizer' because I don't use the POS system every day. I have cashiers who are super speedy on it, and since it's simple for users, it's brought me to the same level as everyone else.” 

“SpotOn is very user-friendly. It saves us a lot of time and allows for better accuracy.” 

Ease and accuracy are all essential – but so is support. Café Ficelle has found that both SpotOn and COGS-Well deliver exceptional service at every step. 

“We've really differentiated ourselves in a competitive market with 24/7/365 support. We've invested a lot of resources in making sure our clients are taken care of. Our goal is to build relationships and grow with them,” said Scott Youkilis, Restaurateur in Residence at SpotOn. 

“98% of our calls are answered in two minutes,” added Kyle Davis, Account Executive at SpotOn, who also serves as a local resource to many of the company’s clients. 

COGS-Well and SpotOn: Powering Restaurant Growth Together 

With COGS-Well integrated to SpotOn, sales mix data is pulled directly from the POS system and then combined with the recipe information for each menu item in the sales mix. 

This gives Brenton and his team the insight they need to analyze the profitability of their menu items based on popularity (menu engineering). They can also keep a closer eye on products with a short shelf life. 

“From the COGS-Well side of the integration, it was very simple. It was literally just an email to their team, and they made sure everything was connected. All the product names were the same in the reporting. It was easy to see what everything was and what it is now; we just had to spend some time reorganizing the products post-processing,” Brenton said. 

For Brenton and the team at Café Ficelle, the combination of COGS-Well and SpotOn has been the perfect solution for scaling their business. With greater control over inventory, visibility into costs, and tools that make day-to-day operations easier, they’ve been able to focus on what matters most: serving their customers. 

“Our goal is to sell out of our baked goods by closing time because we can't sell those items the next day, but we also don't want to run out. In COGS-Well, we use data coming from invoices and SpotOn to run a daily report of items received versus items sold to find the right balance,” Brenton explained. 

The team has also been experimenting with prime cost reporting – the combination of cost of goods sold and labor.   

“I have my commissary, but I also have a pastry team at one of our restaurants, and that restaurant is sending cakes and desserts to another restaurant. COGS-Well allows me to put the labor burden for items being transferred with the right locations,” Brenton shared. 

As Nina Weiland, Hospitality Solutions Expert at COGS-Well, put it: “I don't think any other inventory system works so well with point-of-sale systems. The information we automatically pull from SpotOn is essential for getting the theoretical cost and usage of inventory.”