Five Guys, the American burger chain that has become a staple of Britain’s high streets and shopping centres, has instructed CAPA to conduct nationwide audits of its restaurants.
CAPA will be conducting full property and accounts payable audits on 150 sites the franchise trades from, as Five Guys looks to make savings from its vast portfolio of restaurants around the country.
Five Guys remains one of the major success stories in the UK casual dining market in recent years. Having originally launched in the USA in 1986, it then launched in the UK in 2013 with a flagship venue near Covent Garden in London. After an expansion surge, the business now trades from 150 UK sites in largely prime locations.
The business has orchestrated a similar expansion globally. Some 30 years after the American Murrell family opened the first Five Guys in Virginia, there are now almost 1,500 locations worldwide and another 1,500 units in development, as at 2020.
As part of managing costs efficiently across such a large portfolio, the franchise has appointed CAPA to conduct the audits on all UK locations, plus its restaurants around Europe.
It means CAPA’s Audit team will undertake a forensic analysis of outgoings through the UK and European outlets, using bespoke software to interrogate data on expenditure including utility bills, rates and property service management costs.
The team will inspect the information to discover any errors and anomalies, before recovering any overpaid sums for the creditors. The team will do the same with all invoices paid out across the entire UK and Europe businesses, to establish if further savings and cash can be recovered for the group.
The instruction marks one of CAPA’s many ‘live’ appointments, where the team is called in to help a thriving business make large savings and where possible, generate and recover cash from overpayments. CAPA’s team has undertaken this successfully for clients including McDonald’s and Co-op.
