Sourdough toasts, focaccia straight from the oven, natural wine and coffee made properly. The locals love it and the tables are full.
The numbers didn't feel as good as the room looked though. Vinci, the owner, had a hunch he was working hard for not much, but no way to see where it was going. So we went looking.
We started with the till. Every sale runs through Square, and Square's tax report is what the gestoría (the local bookkeeper) uses to file the IVA returns. IVA is Spain's version of GST.
When we rebuilt the sales from scratch, the IVA didn't add up. Square was counting it twice on part of the sales, so the report showed more tax owing than there really was. That report had been filed as is for most of the year.
The upshot: well over a thousand euros of IVA paid that was never owed. It can be claimed back by correcting the returns, and we caught the next one before it was filed. Nobody had done anything wrong on purpose. The report just looked right, so nobody questioned it.
Next we built a margin model for the whole menu. We took months of Square sales and matched them against a stack of supplier invoices: flour, coffee, milk, cheese, fruit, wine, cakes, the lot. Then we costed every dish and every drink, down to the gram.
Most of it lined up nicely. But a couple of areas were using more stock than the sales said they should. Small amounts each day, but they add up over a year. Now Vinci knows exactly where to look and what good looks like.
The model also showed which items were priced below where they needed to be. We set simple targets for each part of the menu (food, coffee, drinks and bought-in cakes) and checked every price against them. Nothing went down and no item went up by more than a euro unless Vinci chose it.
If sales hold, the new list is worth several hundred euros a month. We tested the tough case too. Even if customers react the way research says diners usually do, it still comes out a few hundred a month ahead, and sales would need to drop by more than one in ten before the rises cost him anything.
Vinci went through the list line by line and made a few calls of his own. The new prices went live with a fresh bilingual menu in English and Spanish, built around them.
The practical results included:
We're a Kiwi practice and most of our clients are in New Zealand. Simon lives in Palma, and Vinci's café is just down the road. The work was the same work we do at home: look closely, check the numbers everyone trusts, and turn what we find into something the owner can act on.
If we can do it for a café on a Mallorcan side street, we can do it for you, wherever you are in New Zealand. It's never just compliance. It's finding the money that's quietly slipping away.
Wondering what's hiding in your numbers? Book a free chat.