Client profile

Cava Group is a privately held casual Mediterranean restaurant chain founded in 2006, with locations across the United States under the names Cava Mezze Grill and Zoës Kitchen. 

Engagement scope

Cava Group acquired Zoës Kitchen. One of the biggest challenges the combined companies faced was the massive amount of disparate data that existed across the organizations. Information was housed in different data sets on different platforms, and the lack of a common lexicon across the platforms resulted in a longer run time for the CFO and controller to get financial statements. In addition, Cava’s preexisting set of financials was being aggregated via their data warehouse using third-party applications, complex formulas, and scripts to connect and map the various accounts and reconcile transactions. This process was extremely cumbersome and took a long time to produce accurate reports for the finance team. 

Synopsis

The CohnReznick team transformed the group’s financial operations by reviewing and streamlining their financial processes and creating new business methodologies that encompassed operations across all the Cava Group entities. Cava Group selected NetSuite as the sole financial source for their entire operation, and CohnReznick’s team copied, converted, and migrated all data from the other platforms into a new instance of NetSuite. 

Results

Once Cava Group was on a single platform, the CFO and controller were able to report to their financial institutions more efficiently and accurately leveraging a “one-stop” financial reporting hub accessible to anyone in the organization with access to NetSuite. The move to the new platform allowed the CohnReznick team to optimize the new environment by removing unwanted business processes and adding new and improved functionality that enabled all the entities to operate together in a standardized and connected approach. The integration of NetSuite with their point of sale (POS) and operational data sources resulted in a dramatic improvement in visibility to Revenue and Expenses. Cava Group is now able to see sales across all stores and all entities on a daily basis, as opposed to weekly and sometimes monthly in the legacy environment. A similar improvement was made in expense management and visibility, with access to this information now available weekly as opposed to monthly in the legacy environment. 

Workflow development summary

The following business workflows were created to improve business processes and create accountability through approvals. 

• Journal Entry Approvals 
• Purchase Order Approvals 
• Vendor Bill Payment Holds 
• Custom field values on forms 
• Electronic Bank Payments 
• Positive Pay 

NetSuite implementation scope overview

CohnReznick configured the following areas for the client. 

• Accounts Payable & Accounts Receivable 
• New and optimized chart of accounts for combined entities 
• Subsidiary, Department, Class, Location 
• Automated Intercompany Management 
• Project Accounting 
• Allocation and Amortization 
• Integration with data warehouse and multiple third-party platforms (POS, inventory, catering portal) 
• Automated AP Management 
• Month-end close process
• Fixed Assets 
• Planning and budgeting integration 
• Client banking integration