Customer Success: Round Table Pizza Tracks the Dough with Sage Fixed Assets
Heavy-duty ovens. Warming equipment. Salad bar fixtures. Booths, ordering counters and cash registers. The capital assets in just one Round Table Pizza restaurant boggle the mind. Multiply that more than a hundredfold, and you’ve got an idea of the challenges faced by Denise Mattson, tax manager at Round Table’s corporate headquarters in Concord, Calif.
“We’re strengthening our business model by expanding and operating more stores owned by the company,” explains Mattson. “In just two years, we’ve gone from 60 to 115 company-owned stores. As we make acquisitions and build new locations, we’re deluged with fixed assets that must be accounted for. Rather than hiring a couple of employees to keep track of them all, we implemented Sage Fixed Assets – Planning.”
Every company has a unique process for capital budgeting and project management, which is why Sage Fixed Assets – Planning was designed for flexibility. Whether assembling multi-component equipment, upgrading machinery, constructing buildings, or just accumulating separate invoices prior to placing a fixed asset into service, Sage Fixed Assets – Planning helps companies take control of spending and streamline project accounting, eliminating cumbersome spreadsheets, manual data entry, and mountains of invoices.
Recipe for Success
Round Table Pizza’s accounting department had used Sage Fixed Assets for years—for financials, depreciation, and tax reporting—and was pleased with the quality and performance of Sage Fixed Assets – Depreciation. So when the company needed to expand the system and link to the general ledger, it selected another product from Sage, Sage Fixed Assets – Planning
“Sage Fixed Assets – Planning replaced five different levels of spreadsheets that we’d been manually reconciling each month,” says Mattson. “We use the project levels within Sage Fixed Assets – Planning for each of the 15 spending pools that comprise our annual budget. Our approved capital expenditure requests become the line items in the Sage Fixed Assets product. Actuals form the third sublevel.”
Flexibility has proven to be one of the biggest benefits Round Table received from its Sage Fixed Assets-based solution. “Because of the adaptability engineered into Sage Fixed Assets – Planning, we have great latitude to use the product exactly the way we want,” Mattson notes. “Admittedly, we have come up with a unique application of the software. But it really works for us.”
Great Data, However You Slice It
Mattson describes the Sage Fixed Assets products as serving as a subledger for the general ledger. “We use the Sage Fixed Assets products to track fixed assets by store, doing away with cost centers in the general ledger and greatly simplifying our fixed asset accounting process,” she says. “We could never
have gotten this level of detail without the Sage Fixed Assets solutions.”
Capital expenditure reports are created in Sage Fixed Assets – Planning, and then printed to a file, which Mattson’s staff sends by e-mail to ten top executives and directors. “The reports receive rave reviews for being easy to read and professional,” she says.
With more acquisitions and new stores on the horizon, Round Table is ready for expansion with Sage Fixed Assets. “Our entire fixed asset process is automated now, which means that we can grow by another 50 percent without hiring staff in the fixed asset department,” Mattson says. “Not only are we running
the company smarter, but we’re doing accounting tasks that would’ve been utterly impossible before.”
Written by DSD Business Systems Staff.
