Hestias Grill is a mid sized restaurant in Nairobi’s CBD. While they offer a small sit-in space, the bulk of their business comes from high-volume food deliveries to surrounding offices. Orders are placed throughout the day, with many payments being settled later in the evening.

The Challenge

1. The cafe relied on two separate sets of notebooks. Every waiter and the cehf had their own note book. It madeit hard to reconcile orders at the end of the day.
2. Manual reconciliation was an exhausting process, often taking several hours every night to match notebook entries with M-Pesa and cash payments.
3. The owner had no way to track the actual cost of production or compare raw material usage (like flour) against the final items sold (like chapatis).
4. Monitoring business performance was difficult for the owner without being physically present to go through manual records.

The Solution

1. The system was deployed on smartphones rather than bulky hardware, allowing waiters to capture orders and payments on the go.
2. A recipe-tracking feature was activated to link raw material purchases to production, such as calculating how many chapatis should be produced from a specific amount of flour.
3. Automated reporting was configured to track not just total revenue, but also the actual cost of goods and gross profit per item.
4. An anomaly detection layer was added to flag days when sales were unusually low or high, allowing the owner to investigate specific causes.
5. A WhatsApp summary feature was integrated to send daily essentials to the owner’s phone every evening.

The Outcome

1. Evening reconciliation, which previously took hours, is now instant and accurate, matching the system’s records to the shilling.
2. The owner can now detect wastage or spoilage by comparing what was produced in the kitchen against what was actually sold.
3. The business is now managed by "exceptions," meaning the owner only needs to dig into detailed reports if the WhatsApp summary highlights an anomaly.
4. Decision-making is now based on clear profit margins and production efficiency rather than just looking at the total cash collected.