MarginEdge is an interesting Cloud-based Application that has recently shown up in the Intuit App Center, be sure to check out their landing page. I might have considered it for a spot within one of our ‘newest neighbors in the App neighborhood’ articles except that I probably would have needed to take up a whole block to cover the various functionalities that MarginEdge performs.
They offer both a ‘Basic’ and a ‘Premium’ version of the App which has differing functionality, but I am going to summarize the feature set overall. I will let you figure out what your restaurant clients may need, and then negotiate pricing since they specify that you should ‘Contact them’ regarding Premium pricing.
With respect to functionalities, at first glance you might think MarginEdge is an Accounts Payable ‘data capture’ App allowing users to take pictures of invoices on their iPhone or Android device as well as scan or email them into the App. You would indeed be correct, but that’s just one of the features MarginEdge offers. So I suspect about now some of you are saying, “that all sounds fine Murph but there are a lot of solutions that do that, in fact you just did an APP COMPARE article a few weeks ago on data-capture Apps, so what makes MarginEdge unique for Restaurants?”
Well, one of the things that makes MarginEdge unique is what it does with this A/P information once it’s captured. It doesn’t just let you code it and post it to your general ledger in QuickBooks, no it also let’s you integrate your paperless invoice processing including inventory information within your ‘restaurant specific’ Point-of-sale system. At the time I am writing this, MarginEdge supports the following 30-plus Point-of-sale systems commonly used within the restaurant/food-service/hospitality industry: Aldelo, Aloha, Breadcrumb, Brink, Clover, Digital Dining, Dinerware, EZSuite, Focus, Future POS, Harbortouch, Honeybaked, Lavu, Micros, NCC, NetPOS, Ordyx, POSitouch, PriSM, QSRSoft, Qu (Gusto), Restaurant Manager, Revel, Salido, Simphony, Square, Talech, Toast, and Totaltouch. Even better, they are actively adding more POS systems, probably faster than I can write this story.
As if this wasn’t enough, there is what is obviously a machine learning/artificial intelligence piece of the pie (that’s restaurant jargon for techno stuff) because they use computer wizardry so all item-level detail you upload into MarginEdge not only updates your inventory costs, but then your recipe prices and what should be your food prices. That’s kind of important stuff for a restaurant owner to know…they may not bump the menu prices, but they need to know if the filet mignon has just gone up by 40% over last week’s order (wouldn’t you think).
Source: Adapted from MarginEdge Co. website content
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But I am not done yet. MarginEdge also integrates your Point-of-sale solution with your QuickBooks. Sales entries in your POS will be posted to QuickBooks along with the respective payments received. Both the A/P liabilities and Payments for those payables processed via MarginEdge will also be posted in QuickBooks exactly as you designate them to be coded to your general ledger. No matter what merchant services you maybe using with your POS, you will remain in balance in QuickBooks because every transaction can be easily reconciled with the bank deposits via MarginEdge postings.
By the way, MarginEdge also works with Xero, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics and Intacct if you work with restaurants and hospitality businesses that don’t use either QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop. By the way, MarginEdge Co. goes by ‘me’ for short and they are based in Fairfax, Virginia.
So, I suggest that you let ‘me’ tell you why ‘me’ maybe the right solution for your restaurant, hospitality and food-service clients who use QuickBooks (or one of those other GLs I mentioned). Why not give them a shout and let them give you a tour of what ‘me’ (I mean ‘they’) can help you with. (All this ‘me’ and ‘they’ and ‘I’ can get confusing, can’t it?)
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