Management control and margin
For owners, chief executives and general managers of food manufacturing companies and of restaurant and retail networks.
Senior leadership decides on the numbers it has,
at the moment it has them.
AC Retail Advisory builds the system that makes those numbers available in time, at the depth of detail where the decision is actually taken: the single unit, the single line, the single customer.
The work covers three things: where the numbers come from, the P&L of each site or line, and the way the result reaches the people who decide.
Who it is for
Companies that manufacture
Food manufacturers that read the result at company level and need it rebuilt by line, by SKU, by customer and by channel.
Companies that run sites and stores
Restaurants and retail chains, from a single site to a network, where the margin of the single unit drives the decisions to relaunch, to open and to close.
Companies that answer to an investor
Companies backed by venture capital or private equity funds, which have to produce stable reporting for the board and for whoever funds the growth.
The situations the engagement starts from
The monthly close arrives when the month is already gone
Consolidated data becomes available halfway through the following month, and the corrections are applied to a reality that has changed in the meantime.
The result by unit stays an assumption
The P&L exists at company level; below that level the margin of each unit is estimated from memory, and the decisions to relaunch or to close are taken on that estimate.
The data sits in several systems that do not talk to each other
POS, warehouse, purchasing, payroll and accounting produce numbers that do not reconcile, and reconciling them by hand absorbs the people who should be analyzing them.
Reporting changes shape with every request
The board, the lender and the bank ask for different views, and every request generates work from scratch instead of an extraction.
The plan lives in one file and the actuals in another
The budget is built once a year in one shape, the actuals arrive in another, and comparing the two calls for a manual reconciliation at every close.
The numbers arrive and the decision stays put
Reporting is produced on schedule, with no threshold set for when action is taken and no one named to take it, and the document circulates until the following close.
What the work covers
Where the numbers come from
Where each number comes from, who produces it and when. The checks done by hand today become automatic rules. Without this step, nothing else holds.
The starting point is what the systems already produce: POS, warehouse, purchasing, payroll and accounting are compared over the same period and the differences are explained one by one, before any view is built on top. Process digitalization →
The P&L by unit and by channel
Unit, product line, customer, channel: the level of detail is set on the decisions the company actually takes, with allocation criteria stated openly.
How shared costs are split across sites or lines changes which one appears to make money. That is why the criterion is written down, agreed with senior leadership and held steady over time, so comparison across periods and units holds. Business development →
The management dashboard
A few indicators, chosen because they move the result, with the threshold that signals when action is needed. Refreshed without redoing the work every month.
Every indicator has an owner, a reading frequency and the threshold beyond which action is triggered, with the expected action defined alongside the threshold.
The close cycle and the variances
The close is shortened and made repeatable, and variance analysis becomes a procedure instead of an investigation.
The tasks of the close are sequenced with an owner and a day, and the items that call for an estimate every month are ruled once. The analysis concentrates on the lines that move the result, with the explanation arriving alongside the number.
Reporting for the board and the lenders
A stable format that holds up in outside discussion and that is extracted without rework.
The format holds together the result for the period, the position against plan and the measures the outside counterparty follows — cash, margin by unit, progress against the plan — so that every further request is an extraction from the same structure.
From the spreadsheet to a system
When the spreadsheet no longer holds the volume, the model is moved onto a tool chosen together with the client, who keeps ownership of it.
The choice of tool comes after the model works on real data, and it is assessed on total cost: licences, implementation, data to migrate and hours from the people who will use it every month. Operations and organization →
What the company has to put in
A management control engagement consumes time from the people who hold the data, and the point is written into the proposal.
Three things are needed. Access to the data that exists — P&L, management system, POS and warehouse extracts, working files — in whatever form it is in. Some hours from the people who produce the numbers today, concentrated in the fact-finding phase and in the first assisted close. And one person inside the company who can say the last word when a criterion has to be closed.
Where the data does not exist, building it enters the scope and is quantified before work begins: it is work that stays with the company after the engagement ends.
What the client is left with
- The P&L model by unit, running on the company’s real data
- The dashboard with the chosen indicators and the alert thresholds
- The documented monthly close procedure, with an owner and a timetable
- The bridge between plan and actuals, maintainable by the company’s own people
- The reporting formats for outside counterparties
- The company’s own people trained to maintain the system
The experience the engagement rests on
The person who leads the engagement has read the P&L from inside the company, with responsibility for the result. As Managing Director of the Italian subsidiary of KellyDeli, with full P&L responsibility, the network went from zero to ninety-five corners and revenue from zero to 65 million euro in three years. As CEO Italy of EatHappy, with responsibility extended in 2022 to France and the Netherlands and a direct line to the international board, the same P&L was read across three markets: labour cost, network density and channel terms move the break-even point, and the control system is what makes that shift visible before the decision is taken.
Among AC Retail Advisory engagements, at Salumificio Marsili the review of pricing and management control, with the inventory forecast and the analysis of production KPIs.
Who works on the engagement
The engagement is directed by Andrea Calistri, founder of AC Retail Advisory. Execution is assigned to the practitioner chosen for the scope, introduced to the client before work begins.
