Outsourced accounting and payroll for a 60-outlet F&B chain

Background

The client is a domestic coffee and beverage chain that grew from 25 to 60 outlets in two years. Most staff work in shifts, turnover is high and many employees are part-time. The five-person finance team could not keep pace: revenue from point-of-sale terminals, e-wallets and food-delivery apps was recorded in separate places, and payroll was prepared by hand in spreadsheets.

Challenges

• The monthly payroll took 6 days to finalise, and 40–50 payslips on average had to be corrected after payment.
• Management received a chain-wide P&L only after 25 days and could not see which outlets were loss-making in time to act.
• Social insurance and personal income tax treatment for seasonal workers was inconsistent.

Our approach

• Weeks 1–2 — takeover: inventoried source documents, reviewed payables, receivables and cash balances at all 60 outlets, and reconciled them against six months of bank statements.
• Weeks 3–5 — data standardisation: brought POS and payment-channel data into a single upload template, with each outlet set up as a cost centre.
• Weeks 6–8 — payroll: standardised rules for shifts, allowances and overtime, and built an employee classification table to determine the appropriate insurance and withholding obligations.
• Weeks 9–10 — go-live: a shared working calendar, a dedicated channel with area managers and a tracking dashboard on Corvane Portal.

Results

Payroll for around 1,100 employees is now finalised in 2 days, and post-payment corrections fell to fewer than 5 per month. Store-level P&L reports are available every Monday morning, and the monthly report is completed by the sixth working day. Using these figures, management closed 3 persistently loss-making outlets and adjusted opening hours at 11 others. Over three years of service, all recurring tax and insurance filings have been submitted on time.

“An F&B chain needs numbers by the week, not by the quarter. Our job is to make data from 60 outlets flow into one place, clean and on time.” — Ms Nguyen Hoai An, Partner, Accounting & Outsourcing, Corvane Advisory

Lessons learned

Outsourced accounting works only when responsibilities are clearly written down: outlets own source documents and timekeeping, while Corvane owns processing, review and reporting. Standardising payroll rules before automating them prevents old errors from being carried into a new system. A simple management report delivered reliably is more useful for decision-making than a comprehensive one that arrives late.

After the first year, the scope was extended to store-level budgeting and tracking of new-outlet costs, with each new outlet onboarded through a standard 15-step checklist.