Jim’s Steakout Saves $500,000 in Yearly Food Costs with Craftable

Buffalo’s favorite fast-casual chain for Philly cheesesteaks saved $500,000 in food costs and 640 labor hours in one year after implementing Craftable.

About Jim’s Steakout

A proudly “Buffalo run business,” Jim’s Steakout’s subs, hoagies, and namesake Philly cheesesteaks have powered the night owls of western New York for over 4 decades.

The Problem

Guy Macon, Controller of Jim’s Steakout, was accustomed to managing the business’ finances on spreadsheets. “We used Excel to manually enter sales figures. Once entered, the spreadsheet would compare those sales numbers to formulas and determine food cost variances,” says Guy.

He recognized that the spreadsheet was prone to errors. Common mistakes, like typos, duplicate entries, and deleted cells, were creating inconsistencies between Excel and QuickBooks, Jim’s accounting platform.

But when Jim’s Steakout transitioned from Micros POS to Toast, the spreadsheet became even more impractical. Toast’s reporting was much different than the format of the Excel workbook, causing GMs to spend even more time on manual data transfer.

Meanwhile, food costs were creeping higher. But without a correct and complete dataset, Guy didn’t have the visibility he needed to understand where the business could find savings.

The Solution

Guy needed a solution that could help him integrate datasets and offer insights on how he could control costs. So, he partnered with Craftable.

“We decided that the cost of the service would, at the very least, be paid for by the reduction in food costs.”
—Guy Macon, Controller, Jim’s Steakout

With Craftable, Guy and the Jim’s team get a single source of truth for ordering and F&B management: EDI receives vendor invoices, Toast integration automatically ingests sales data, and QuickBooks integration removes human error from food cost calculations. 

Guy could not only optimize labor, but also accurately report food costs, including actual vs. theoretical data. For example, Craftable helped Guy’s calculate each serving of French fries, including food, labor, and the portioning bags they were served in. Theoretically, a consistent portion size should’ve saved Jim’s on the cost of each French fry serving. But the data showed that, in actuality, it was costing Jim’s more in labor and portion bags than it would cost them to over serve fries.

The Impact

The Outcome

By removing human data entry from the equation, Guy eliminated the common mistakes that were plaguing his food cost calculations so he could finally get an accurate representation of where the business stood.

In partnership with Craftable, Guy saved his GMs 10 hours per week on data entry and reduced data entry for the finance team by 10 hours per month. Plus, he was able to cut food costs by several percentage points, reducing his spend by $500,000 per year.

“Considering the sales of ten restaurants, the savings were tremendous.”
—Guy Macon, Controller, Jim’s Steakout