While working with clients in the retail space with my other business Streamline Analytics I was often introduced to Hospitality business owners, who often faced similar challenges to each other: The amount of manual spreadsheets used to run and manage their venues. I even spoke to a POS Supplier who confirmed “they all use spreadsheets”. Don’t get me wrong, I love Excel as much as the next number cruncher and started my coding journey within Excel writing macros.
Given the amount of cash pubs, clubs & restaurants had to hold on their premises this was such an eye opener, I was astonished to find the sector still relied on manual daily taking sheets, or DTS for short. These DTS’s could have up to 200 to 300 different fields showing where the revenue has come from, where it’s gone and how it’s been moved around the business. Each field had to be entered manually and copied from a range of different systems. I decided to ring around a few more hospitality groups and kept getting the same answer.
Automating daily takings
Despite having automated reservation systems, point-of-sale systems, ordering systems, and more, pubs, clubs & restaurants had overlooked a crucial issue: they were still managing their finances using Excel.
I was astonished that there wasn’t already a platform out there that pulled in all data from these systems to make for faster and easier end-of-night reconciliations. The opportunity became obvious and I started to work up an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to take to market.
At the same time elsewhere in Sydney, Simon (Etchells), our Chief Commercial Officer at Wirely, was working as a founding member of Dimmi. Dimmi was a restaurant reservation and booking application ‘start-up’ shaking up the industry and as he went from venue to venue he saw the same thing. Spreadsheets everywhere. We were introduced by chance by a mutual client at the end of 2020, I told him what I was working on, and we decided to launch Wirely.
With my technical skills and his background in Hospitality tech, we thought we could help the industry do a better job of managing its finances and back-of-house operations.
Wirely was launched in March 2021, with the idea of automating the daily takings sheet and doing away with so many of the problems that come with it. We quickly realised that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Other challenges include the significant time staff spend manually inputting figures daily, the risk of human error, the necessity to create manual finance journals, and the high risk of fraud, not to mention the lack of real-time visibility.
ENTER Wirely
Aside from automating the daily taking sheet and finance journals, Wirely also provides visibility about their organisation’s financials, all pulled together from different systems in one place. Wirely provides real-time reports on key metrics, such as wages vs sales, best-selling items and cost of goods sold, helping managers to make better operational decisions. As our relationship with the industry grows so does our extensive list of 30+ integration partners.
We will continually innovate and listen to our 5000+ Wirely users to better help them manage and run their businesses. We’re really excited to be helping pubs, restaurants and clubs and all manner of hospitality venues better manage their venues and support the hospitality sector in Australia, soon to be World Wide.
We’re JUST GETTING STARTED!!!