Whether you run three gastropubs or thirty restaurants, the pattern repeats. Service is brilliant and the numbers are a mystery until month end, by which time the GP has gone, the rota overspent and the reviews trended without anyone noticing.
A bespoke AI platform fuses your EPOS, your suppliers, your rotas, your reviews and your bookings into one brain you own, with a daily 8am flash report that reads like your best ops director wrote it.
Supplier prices creep three percent here, a portion drifts heavy there, and a menu that was engineered at 72% quietly runs at 67%. Nobody sees it until the month-end pack. Your brain reconciles live sales against live ingredient costs, dish by dish, site by site, and tells you the morning it moves.
Rotas get copied from last week. Then a sunny Saturday smashes the kitchen or a dead Tuesday burns the wage line. The platform forecasts covers from bookings, history and events, then scores every rota against it before you publish, not after payroll.
Someone replies to TripAdvisor when they get a minute. Nobody reads two hundred reviews across five sites and spots that wait times at one location started trending three weeks ago. Cortex reads every review, drafts every reply in your voice and reports what is really trending, good and bad.
Every GM runs their own numbers their own way, so the weekly meeting is twenty minutes of arguing about whose figures are right. One platform, one definition of GP, one league table. The meeting becomes about what to do, not what happened.
Recipes costed against live supplier prices. Sales mix against margin, plotted automatically. The stars, the workhorses and the dogs identified weekly, with reprice and replace suggestions from Cortex.
Covers forecast from bookings, seasonality and events. Rotas scored against forecast before publishing. Labour percentage tracked daily by site, with anomalies flagged the morning after, not at month end.
Invoice lines reconciled against agreed prices automatically. Variances flagged, credits drafted, and a supplier league table built from real delivery and pricing behaviour.
All platforms in one inbox. Sentiment scored by site and by theme. Replies drafted in your tone for one-click approval. Trends reported weekly so a service problem never gets three weeks of momentum.
We do not rip out what works. Bookings, spend and visit history fuse into one guest record, so marketing goes to people who actually come back, and the platform knows your regulars by name.
GP, labour, covers, average spend and sentiment on one board, normalised so sites compare fairly. GMs see their numbers daily. The ops meeting starts with answers instead of arguments.
Cortex knows every dish cost, every rota, every supplier invoice and every review across every site. Ask it why GP moved, whether Saturday is staffed, or what guests are really saying this month.
"It answers like an operations director who has read every till report, every invoice and every review, and never once needed a day off."
Every director takes two minutes on the last Friday of the month. The brain collates their updates, cross-references them against everything it knows about the business, and produces the board pack. Then it adds its own report: an independent analysis no director wrote, with no political considerations, that flags what the board needs to act on before the meeting starts.
September trading mixed. Leeds and city centre strong. Fargate below target for third consecutive week. Christmas bookings 22% ahead of last year. Need to discuss Fargate performance today.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:38Labour averaging 36.2% across the estate against 34% target. Fargate the main problem at 41%. Two compliance certificates due for renewal at Manchester. Staff turnover up slightly, three sites recruiting.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:42Food GP across estate at 67.4% against 69% target. Wastage running above target at Leeds and Fargate. Supplier price increases coming through on dairy and protein. Christmas menus approved and distributed.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:46EBITDA for the month £38,400 against £46,000 target. Shortfall driven by Fargate underperformance and estate-wide labour overspend. Cash position solid. Two supplier payment runs outstanding.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:50The following analysis was prepared by Cortex from the director updates above, combined with live platform data. It is independent of any director's submission and has been prepared without prior sight of the agenda.
Fargate has underperformed for three consecutive months. Revenue is 14% below budget, labour is at 41% and customer feedback scores are the lowest in the estate. The data suggests three compounding issues: a menu change that removed high spend items, a rota structure that does not flex with covers, and a site manager who has been in post for four months without a structured review. This needs a board decision on intervention approach, not another month of monitoring.
Estate-wide labour is tracking 2.2 points above target. At current run rate the year-end overspend will be approximately £67,000. The majority is concentrated in two sites. The Fargate issue is structural. The Leeds overspend is agency-driven and is correctable with a rota change. Recommend approving the Leeds rota restructure this week and treating Fargate as a separate agenda item.
Christmas bookings are the strongest pipeline the business has had in three years. Average spend per head is up £9 which suggests the premium pricing strategy is landing. The risk is staffing. Based on confirmed bookings the estate needs 34 additional shift hours per week across the peak period. Starting seasonal recruitment now will save approximately £3,800 in agency costs versus leaving it to November.
Two food safety certifications at Manchester expire within 35 days. Both require staff attendance at external training. Neither has been booked. Given the current trading pressure at Manchester this is at risk of being deprioritised. A lapsed certification at this site during a busy Christmas period would be a significant operational and reputational risk. Recommend confirming training dates this week.
Cortex has no politics, no relationships to protect and no agenda. It tells the board what the data says, not what anyone wanted it to say.
It has read every director's update and cross-referenced it against live platform data before it writes a word. No human could do that in 40 seconds.
Every claim references its source. The board can interrogate any finding and trace it back to the underlying data, transaction or record.
Runs under the Sheriff: cites sources, flags uncertainty, never invents figures and always distinguishes between what the data shows and what it recommends.
A 30 minute call. No deck, no pressure, no junior sales rep. You talk, we listen, and you leave with a straight answer on whether a brain makes sense for your business.