Story

Small business owners face a significant hurdles when they step into restaurant operations. Along with serving customers, managing staff, and preparing meals, it’s common to be overwhelmed by complexities of business accounting. This is compounded by slim margins and tight budgets that force operators to rely on SaaS tools like Restaurant365, often without a dedicated accountant. Restaurant365’s payroll journal templates were a prime opportunity to save time and reduce complexity, as it is repeating task that requires complete accuracy.

However, translating their payroll obligations into an R365 journal template was a difficult feat. Read to the end to see the solution I found.

Problem

Small and medium sized restaurant owners lack the accounting teams of large franchises.

1. They may be leaning on a number of different applications, web tools, paper documents or custom spreadsheets to calculate their payroll obligations. This makes the necessary information hard to gather, compounded by a lack of contextual knowledge.

2. If payroll journal entries are not consistently accurate, operators can face significant problems - under reporting employee’s taxable income, underpaying tips or wages, incorrect withholding - which may come with additional costs for them and harm to their employees.

3. Setting up R365 payroll journal templates was a complicated step during new customer implementation. Many clients faced major challenges trying to adapt the convoluted system an accountant setup for them in the past, to a more streamlined method with Restaurant365.

Approach

Take a two-pronged approach: Through interviews with our customer success team, I learned that our implementation coaches were building complex, custom Excel spreadsheets to translate a customer’s current payroll accounting into a new R365 payroll journal. Even if I were to build a better tool to aid them, many felt that some customers benefited from the hand holding and would never be able to take on this step alone.

Empower, don’t abandon: These interviews also told me that other customers only struggle with initial setup of a payroll journal template. With some guidance many quickly became confident in using the template to create regular payroll entries, but needed careful guidance to get to that point. I wanted to make sure that happened quickly, but with a fallback just in case.

Standardize: Despite its reputation, accounting is at times inconsistent. Terms to describe payroll - wages, tips, salary, tax withholding - can vary significantly. Some restaurants track payroll for salaried employees separately from hourly employees, as they have different pay periods and pay structures. I identified early in the process that we needed to make sure the system spoke the way that specific user expected. At its core, manually creating a payroll journal entry requires transcription - there needed to be absolute clarity on what number goes where.

Results

Better internal tools: My initial prototype focused on two flows - one to setup a payroll journal template, and a second to use that template to create payroll journal entries. The template creation allows EVERY field name to be customized. Sections can have helpful notes and comments applied to them. Fields can be re-ordered to match whatever funky payroll report a user might have. This is also the only time account names and numbers are mentioned. The intent is for customers to pay a small fee to be coached through this process to handle complex details. Then, when clients use their shiny new template, they can just enter-tab-enter-tab their way through to quickly transcribe value.

Realtime Feedback: Along with notes and comments, the template is smart enough to do basic checksum work along the way. Certain sections are expected to balance each other, or be more/less than each other. If the user miskeys a value and tries to withhold $1,000,000 for taxes on $10,000 in wages they will know right away. Or, if they suddenly double the wages for a location they will see a subtle reminder, just to make sure it’s intentional.

Full benefits still to come: As of writing, this feature is still being built. It was so complex and interesting and challenging I could not wait to write about the process! As a product designer I live for these meaty, complex challenges that force me to do a deep dive on a new industry.

Flow 1: Template Setup

This process is used by an internal coach, to help clients build an appropriate payroll journal template, customized to their needs.

Flow 2: Template Use

Once setup, a client user can then use this template repeatedly and with confidence because it’s set up for their specific use case.