Busy every night, and the month still didn't work

Ask any owner about this and you get the same shrug. The dining room is full. Reviews are fine. Everybody is working hard. Then the P&L shows up, food cost is up two points, and nobody can tell you which two points, or when it happened, or what you’re supposed to do about it now that it’s five weeks old.

Between us we’ve opened, run and closed a dozen restaurants. Maitaki got built because we spent a long time on the wrong end of that.

The part every owner will recognize is the office. It’s a corner of the dry store with a chair in it, and the chair has a stack of invoices on it because the desk ran out of room back in March. The answer is in that stack. Beef went up. Or oil did. Or a rep switched the pack size so the price per pound moved while the number printed on the invoice stayed exactly the same. You could find it. It’s also eleven at night, there’s a delivery at six, and one of your cooks just called out.

So you guess, and you buy software.

We bought plenty. Some of it was good. All of it wanted you to go first. Type in your ingredients. Type in your pack sizes. Type in every recipe the way it actually gets made, not the way it’s written on the card. Then keep all of that current by hand while running a restaurant. We did it properly exactly once. It was accurate for about six weeks. Prices kept moving and we didn’t.

Took us way too long to see the obvious part.

Everything that software wanted typed in was already written down. It arrives every morning on the truck: vendor, item, pack size, catch weight, price, date, all of it printed on the invoice sitting in the stack. The recipes are on cards in the walk-in, in somebody’s handwriting, with the gruyère crossed out and rewritten.

None of it was missing. Nobody had time to type it.

So that’s what Maitaki does. You photograph the invoice. You photograph the recipe card, the real one, not a tidy version made for software. It reads both. Every plate on your menu stays costed from then on without anyone touching it, because the invoices keep coming whether you type them in or not. A vendor raises a price, you hear about it that day. Anything you want to know about your own numbers, you ask in plain English and it answers.

Fifteen seconds at the back door. That’s the only part we need from you.