Kristen Sandhurst sits on both sides of the restaurant equation: she is a partner at Edotto, an accounting firm built to serve restaurant operators, and the CFO of an affiliated franchise group running 20 Taco John's and 3 Slim Chickens locations. In this episode, hosts Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney talk with Kristen about what actually moves the numbers in a restaurant operation right now.

The conversation covers the prime cost math that matters (sub-60% prime cost, supplies at 1.25%, repairs and maintenance at 2 to 3% for middle-aged buildings), how a 300 basis point cost of goods improvement came from getting one client to count inventory for the first time, and why an organized chart of accounts is the foundation for every financial insight that follows.

Kristen also breaks down her family's tech stack journey from 20 years on Microsoft Dynamics to Restaurant365 and Paylocity, and how she has been using Claude and ChatGPT to build automations, draft legal agreements, log 70 scanned PDFs into a spreadsheet, and even build a Chrome extension to fix a clunky accounting interface, all without writing code herself.

You will also hear why her group pulled AI out of the drive-thru after testing it at both concepts, where restaurants bleed money without realizing it (food cost and water bills top the list), and her hot take on unattended QSR dining rooms.

Whether you operate one location or a hundred, this episode gives you concrete benchmarks, actionable workflow ideas, and a framework for thinking about AI as task replacement rather than job replacement.

Hosted by Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney

Featured Guest: Kristen Sandhurst, Partner at Edotto

Brought to you by Restaurant365: https://www.restaurant365.com

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