2025 in Review: Multi-Unit Restaurant Success

Every year, we gain a clearer picture of what actually helps operators run more effectively day to day. For COGS-Well’s chain and multi-unit customers, success comes from access to industry expertise, a comprehensive feature set, responsive support, and a provider that is happy to make product customizations and new system integrations.

This article highlights their wins, from increasing control and reducing costs to saving time and improving accuracy – serving up insights from our power users.

Multi-Unit Restaurant Expertise 

COGS-Well is a fourth-generation platform created by a founding team with more than 150 years of combined experience supporting multi-unit restaurant operators with inventory, recipe, and cost management. That experience translates to how well the system works daily for restaurant teams across North America. 

The platform is designed to be flexible, comprehensive, and easily integrated with other systems. COGS avoids the pitfalls of all-in-one systems by being best-in-class, helping multi-location brands manage food and beverage costs with clarity and consistency.

“The team at COGS-Well understands how restaurants operate, and their product is designed so that restaurant operators can easily use and maintain their inventory system." – Tim Anderson, CFO, Hideaway Pizza 

“What we found was a system that is vast in what we're able to do thanks to the amount of reporting and the flexibility COGS-Well makes available to us.” – Jeremy Lanni, Director Ops Tech, &pizza 

Robust Restaurant Management Features 

COGS-Well has all the core tools multi-unit operators rely on in one connected system, including invoice automation, inventory control, recipe management, menu analytics, variance reporting, and more. 

• Invoice Automation: Scan invoices to automatically update inventory items, costs, and quantities, then export to accounts payable to reduce manual entry and improve accuracy. 

• Inventory Control: Manage inventory counts, ordering, receiving, transfers, and waste across all locations. 

• Recipe Management & Costing: Create recipes and model recipe costs against target cost percentage or profit. Build recipes once, and costs automatically update. Easily manage different recipes at different locations.

• Menu Analytics: Evaluate menu performance based on the popularity and profitability of each menu item. View cost trends for recipe items and drill down to see which ingredient cost changes have been most impactful.

• Variance Reporting: Combine recipes and sales data to determine theoretical usage and cost (what both should be), then compare those numbers to actual results to reveal variances. 

• Commissary Management: Produce recipe items at a commissary, transfer them as inventory to restaurant locations, and export cost adjustments to the general ledger. Optionally, add labor and cost markups.

• Accounting Integration: Export invoices to accounts payable, transfer adjustments to the general ledger, inventory count valuations to the general ledger, and POS financial totals to the general ledger.

• Multi-Unit Reporting: Report on single or multiple locations with the ability to isolate and consolidate separate concepts or brands.  See side-by-side comparisons of multiple units to easily evaluate performance. 

 “COGS-Well’s invoice scanning and audit service saves each of our managers 1.5 to 2 hours per week. For 13 locations, it is also saving me 4 hours per week at the home office.” – Billy Williams, IT Manager, Collier Restaurant Group 

“The COGS-Well transfer features are increasing accuracy. The export of transfer adjustments to NetSuite is saving me 2 to 3 hours per month.” – Erica Raihala, Finance & Administration Manager, Bambuza Hospitality Group 

"Measuring our managers on actual versus theoretical inventory cost and usage has increased their knowledge of how COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) work. It also increased their awareness of recipes, waste, and portioning.” – Jennifer Beougher, CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group 

“We use COGS-Well to manage multiple bar and restaurant concepts. It is easy to set up, manage, and report on the restaurants in each concept and to evaluate the performance for the entire concept.” – Chris Carvalho, Director of Accounting, Palisades Hospitality Group

“After switching to COGS-Well, we reduced our COGS by 1% to 1.5%. It is much more cohesive and robust with better reporting than our old system.” – Linda Lui, Director of Finance, Impact Kitchen

Expert Support and Valuable Customizations

For multi-unit operators, responsive and consultative support is just as important as comprehensive software. When you manage multiple locations and rely on knowing results, getting timely answers is critical to keeping decisions moving. 

COGS-Well collaborates with customer teams to understand their workflows, reporting needs, and integration requirements. Not every operation runs the same way, so COGS-Well is happy to make product customizations or integrations that are necessary for customers to optimize their results or better fit their operations. 

“We have done a lot of system implementations over the last few years, and the COGS-Well support team is by far the best we have ever worked with. Any issue we have, any questions we have, their team is always very responsive." – Danielle Panikiewsky, Director of Finance, Playa Bowls 

“We're extremely happy with the support the COGS-Well team has been providing throughout the configuration, training, and rollout processes of the implementation. We're so glad that we started this partnership.” – Emir Ayden, Director of Operations, Impact Kitchen 

“COGS-Well’s support is top-notch. Support has been great and very responsive from the start. When we request new features, COGS-Well has been willing to provide them rather than trying to convince us to change our business processes.” – Jennifer Beougher, CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurants

Operational Insights to Carry Forward 

As multi-unit operators look back on another year of progress, the key drivers of success are having access to industry experts, specialized tools, and greater flexibility within their restaurant management system. Just as important is working with a provider who is willing to go above and beyond to help your team flourish.