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A scaling restaurant group, with back office reality catching up fast
In restaurants, growth does not just mean more covers. It means more invoices, more suppliers, more exceptions, and more people ordering what they need, when they need it.
At Maslow, the day to day reality was clear:
- cost control existed, but often in a sporadic way, triggered by a noticeable increase on a key product,
- data quality issues could silently distort management decisions, with simple setup mistakes like wrong pack sizes creating unexplained stock gaps,
- invoice intake was a constant drain, with a central inbox that required manual sorting and forwarding every single day.
Julia sums up the stakes behind these topics: without the right tools, many controls simply never happen, not because they are not important, but because no one has the bandwidth to run them properly.
Two problems, two different kinds of value
Maslow identified two high impact areas where automation could immediately change the game.
1. Invoice intake: remove the daily, low value workload
Before automation, someone spent around one to two hours per day reading emails, forwarding invoices to the right place, and filing everything correctly. The work had to be done, but it was not particularly rewarding, and it pulled time away from more valuable tasks.
With an invoice intake agent in place, the routine work became automated. Time was reallocated to what still requires humans: supplier exceptions, missing invoices, incorrect billing, and follow ups.
2. Cost controls and data quality: move from “we should do this” to “we can actually do this”
Price control was historically difficult to run consistently. But Maslow also discovered another source of value: improving the accuracy of operational data.
When the source data is wrong, management decisions become noisy. A wrong product setup can explain end of month stock discrepancies that look like operational problems, but are actually data problems.
Automation made these issues visible faster, and enabled controls that simply did not exist before.
As Julia put it, without this kind of tooling, these checks would not have been done at all.
A concrete example: turning invoices into a reliable equipment inventory
One of the most practical wins came from a simple need: building an annual inventory of small kitchen equipment for accounting purposes.
Instead of manually reconstructing item names and prices, Maslow used invoices to generate:
- the list of items,
- consistent item naming,
- prices attached to each item.
This created an inventory that was not only faster to produce, but also cleaner and more reliable.
It also became useful beyond accounting. For a new opening, the same approach helped build a realistic equipment baseline by extracting what was actually purchased for an existing venue, supporting more accurate budgeting.
Implementation: fast, fluid, and product minded
Julia described the setup as rapid and smooth, with a small test phase, a strong cadence, and a team that kept things clear and practical.
The key was not a long transformation project. It was starting from existing, proven building blocks, and adapting them to Maslow’s immediate needs.
What changed first
The earliest changes were operational:
- daily time spent on invoice sorting dropped sharply,
- bandwidth increased without adding headcount immediately,
- recurring tasks moved from “someone has to do it” to “it runs in the background”,
- data issues became easier to spot and correct, improving confidence in day to day numbers.
What comes next
As usage grows, Maslow sees additional opportunities in:
- HR administration checks, such as payroll anomaly tracking,
- compliance routines that currently require manual review, when systems do not offer exports,
- better reporting and collaboration layers, so teams can flag issues, assign owners, and share short summaries instead of exporting tables.
The direction is clear: keep the organisation agile, while steadily upgrading back office maturity through repeatable AI powered workflows.
