Trust In The Numbers

Solotel is a family of venues running some of Australia's most iconic restaurants, bars and pubs. Behind the hospitality sit 140 legal entities. Reporting on one venue means consolidating three of them.

When Karin Hattingh joined as Chief Financial Officer, she immediately saw the challenge. "My biggest challenge when I started at Solotel was how on earth am I going to consolidate all these different entities and all these different ownership groups in a way that I can always trust the number."

Her team of 15 pulled every month together by hand. NetSuite held the transactions. Reporting lived in exports, and the team had to "reconcile numbers on a constant basis". "This was all going into a huge data dump in Excel, so I very quickly realized that we were living in Spreadsheet City, and I could not really trust the numbers from even a previous review."

A month-end took 15 working days at best. "We just couldn't make decisions based on a three-week turnaround, and every single time a small change was made, I had to recheck every single number." The goal was bigger than reporting. "We want to report on the actuals of what actually happened, but we also want to influence the future."

Karin had led finance through this transformation before. At Solotel she started where change would make the most impact.

Commitments first. The company sat in a technology freeze, so she took it to the owner. "I convinced the owner that this will change the way that Solotel reports finances. I also made a commitment that everything will be much quicker. He signed off." But her accountants saw more work. "We have no time for this. We are battling to just get through our day-to-day work." She reframed it as theirs to gain from. "I'm going to give all of you the opportunity. This will look amazing on your CV."

Proof by the next month-end. With Cubewise, she started with the general ledger. The team ran their month-end while she ran the same reports in parallel. "You should have seen their faces when I asked them to pass a journal to make a change, and they started exporting all their trial balances. And I did my load. I pressed F9 and I said, 'oh, it looks good now'." Buy-in followed almost immediately.

Designed for change. "The issue wasn't reporting. The issue was structure." From the first build, she chose to "build it in a very dynamic way" where "it all just works from one master source of the truth". The model reads its structure directly from the source systems, so the business can keep changing shape and the numbers keep up.

Small, smart teams. The sales build took one Cubewise consultant working with the Point-Of-Sale technology partner. Two weeks later, three revenue definitions reconciled to one, in 15-minute increments. They loaded 24 months of history and Karin's commercial accountants then built venue heat maps themselves.

Capability in-house. Solotel gained skills with every deliverable. Her graduates, who can move on every two to three years, learn on the company's data. "Cubewise train your staff one on one, on your own data. I found that the most incredible way to actually teach people how to help themselves."

From sales, the team moved to planning. Budgets, a rolling forecast, a three-way forecast of P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow, and capital modeling.

The first signal came in a board meeting. "A board member was adding the previous month's year to date number to this month's actual and saying, oh, it's working. I said, what do you mean? They said they never used to add up." The trust grew. "The board members, the ownership, even the different department heads started trusting the numbers that we were giving them and no longer going back and checking all those numbers."

Finance shrank the close from 15 working days to five, and owners now get the first reports early, with commentary they can act on to lift profitability. After posting, an adjustment that before cost a full day of re-exports, now takes three minutes to refresh. A structural change, a new venue, entity or grouping, flows through every report, the board pack and the three-way model in one pass. The team gained two to three days each per month for commentary, interpretation, and business partnering.

When a venue underperforms, operations and marketing bring the question to finance. "They would come to the finance team and say, is it possible to do that heat map thing of yours?" The heat maps show revenue in 15-minute increments, venue against peer group, hour by hour. Operations take the numbers into the venue, ask what it takes to drive those hours, and roll the answer out across the peer group. The same data exposed where promotional discounts behaved differently, by venue, by hour.

The first capital test was small. A $300k garden bar refurbishment, modeled on a comparable venue's trading with the host pub's own cost of goods and wages, and the return projected over the first years of operation. Sharper capital modeling has lowered the group's working capital requirements.

Then Solotel shifted its long-term strategy toward owning its venues. A pub trades from $20 million to $100 million. Finance now models prospective acquisitions against the actual monthly trading of the group's venues to decide whether to buy freehold, lease it out, or run it, and what each path returns. "You don't want to waste that kind of transaction costs by buying the wrong one."

Solotel is extending its models with:

• Weather and predictive drivers feeding staffing levels, venue utilization and margin
• Rolling forecasts refined against those drivers
• Deeper venue-level profitability across format, geography and operating models

Would Karin do it again? "I've never thought twice. Without it, you would just spend so much time and effort in just getting the numbers out. Never mind knowing what they mean or interpreting them. So one versus the other. It's just not even a question. Of course I'll do it. I'll always do it again."