8OCTOBER 2021Creative Dining is a food & hospitality contractor and serves colleges & universities, Fortune 500 companies, senior living facilities, and camps & conference centers. The company has grown consistently over the years and is now in 14 states. In March, 2020, a number of our facilities closed due to the pandemic, and this was a test of our new cash management system. Thanks to our move to cloud-based Sage Intacct system two years ago, we were well prepared on the afternoon of March 16, 2020 when we evacuated our corporate offices and staff started to work from home. As I reviewed our emails from that week, it was a time of great anxiety and uncertainty as we were all experiencing for the first time a very real pandemic. One thing we did not have to worry about was our accounting system, which is the foundation for our large organization with over 70 locations. The move to working from home was virtually seamless, and we even gained some new efficiencies.The day after the office was evacuated, our senior staff set up a crisis center in our largest conference room and I pulled up our Sage Intacct Finance Dashboards on the large monitor, and we went to work managing the crisis. Thanks to our ability to use real-time financial information to make quick decisions, we were able to manage the crisis as well as possible. It also helped that our managers, who have been using these Dashboards for the last few years and were well-educated on our financial numbers, were able to educate our clients better. The end result was that we were able to negotiate quickly with our clients and find mutually beneficial solutions to navigate the pandemic.Our intricate understanding of our company finances also allowed us to offer free health care for our laid-off MANAGING FINANCES THROUGH ROBUST ACCOUNTING SYSTEMIN MYOPINIONBy Jeff Banaszak, Chief Financial Officer, Creative Dining Services
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