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When Restaurants Outgrow Their Systems

October 19, 2026 by
When Restaurants Outgrow Their Systems
Robin Ekström
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Most restaurants don't outgrow their food. 
They outgrow their systems.


One branch can run on a till, a stock sheet and an accountant who gets everything at the end of the month. Open a second or third branch and the cracks start to show: stock that doesn't match, food costs nobody can see, and a shift close that depends on one person and a spreadsheet.

Watch the full session

Live demo POS Kitchen, Stock

4

ways guests can order

2–3

months to switch, if you’re ready

Odoo APAC, August 2026

In August, our Managing Director, Khun Kitti, joined Odoo APAC's live session with Benz, Odoo's Partner Manager, to show what running a multi-branch F&B business on one system actually looks like. He introduced himself as the founder of CU, opened with Food Smith, an imported-beef brand whose website, online shop and payments run on Odoo, and then walked through a full restaurant demo. Here are the five problems he started with, and how each one plays out in Odoo.


The 5 problems

1            

Stock doesn't match, so you lose sales.

Items run out without warning. Then someone over-orders to make up for it, and cash sits in the store room.

2            

No recipe, no real food cost.

If a dish isn't broken down into its ingredients, you can't check what you actually used, and stock quietly leaks away.

3            

Every branch is an island.

Each branch's till works on its own, so nobody has a live picture of stock or sales across the business.

4            

The shift closes in Excel.


Staff reconcile cash and payments by hand and send the file to accounting. It's slow, it depends on one person, and every mistake means rework.

5            

The till doesn't talk to accounting.

Sales get entered twice, and the reports arrive too late to act on.

None of these are about cooking.


They're about 
information arriving late, in the wrong place, or not at all.



One flow instead of five systems

Kitti laid out a restaurant’s day as one connected flow. Each step feeds the next, so nothing is typed twice.

2. Receive stock

Scan the barcodes as it arrives

1. Buy ingredients

Odoo drafts the reorder when stock runs low

6. Bill the guest

Split bills, PromptPay, Thai tax invoice

8. See the profit

Every branch, in real time

3. Set the recipe

Each dish deducts its own ingredients

4. Take the order

At the table, or by QR code

7. Close the day

Count the cash. No Excel.

5. Kitchen screen

Food to the kitchen, drinks to the bar


Paying.

Cash, PromptPay QR, cards and gift cards. Split the bill, split the payment, apply a coupon code, and issue an abbreviated or full tax invoice in the Thai format we set up for our clients.

Four ways guests order.

Staff take the order at the table. Set menus apply their promotions automatically. Guests scan a QR code at the table and order from their own phone. And a table booked on the restaurant's website shows up on the floor plan, ready for check-in.

Closing the shift without Excel.

Count the cash, check the QR totals, close. Every sale has already deducted its ingredients and posted to accounting, tagged by branch, so the entries are waiting when the shift ends.

Restocking.

When an ingredient falls below its minimum, Odoo drafts a request for quotation with a suggested quantity. The buyer checks it, confirms the order, and the delivery is received by scanning barcodes on a phone or a handheld scanner.

Every branch in one view.

Stock by branch, dashboards for revenue, top products and best tables, and a profit and loss statement for each branch, in real time.

In Practice

The demo used a sample restaurant in a demo database, so the figures below are demo figures, not a real business.

Recipes and true food cost

In the demo, a 250 g chicken steak sells for 390 THB, and its ingredients cost 67.80 THB. Because the recipe is set up in Odoo (as a bill of materials), every sale deducts the right ingredients, and Odoo can tell you how many more steaks each branch can make from the stock it has. 

Kitchen and bar screens.

Food goes to the kitchen screen and drinks to the bar, automatically. Each order moves from received, to preparing, to done.


1

Can my staff use it in Thai? 


Yes. Odoo supports many languages, and each user can work in their own.

2

Can PromptPay payments be confirmed without checking slips? 

Yes, once bank integration is set up.

3

What about Grab and LINE MAN? 

Grab connects with Odoo, and LINE MAN orders come in through a connection we built.
5

How long does switching take? 

Kitti's honest answer: about two to three months, if the business is ready. One month is rarely realistic, because your team needs time to learn a new way of working.
4

Do the tax invoices meet Revenue Department requirements? 

Yes. Odoo has handled Thai tax requirements for years, and we set up the Thai invoice format for each client.

What owners asked


A real example

One well-known restaurant company we work with ran into exactly these problems as it opened more branches. Separate front-of-house, stock and accounting systems meant errors, rising costs and a daily close that kept running late. The fix was to centralize: POS sales linked straight to inventory, food cost tracked by deducting ingredients through recipes, and each day's sales flowing directly into accounting.

How we approach it

  • Understand the business first. We map how you work before we configure anything.
  • Stay close to standard Odoo. We customize only where it's needed, so upgrades stay simple.
  • Take data seriously. Clean, well-organized product and customer data is what makes everything else work, so migration is a project in its own right.
  • Connect what can't move yet. Where something can't run in Odoo today, we integrate it.
  • Build for the next branch. The setup should still work when you open your next location, not just this one.

As our motto puts it: "Nothing is perfect or the best, so we will never stop developing and delivering to support our customer's needs."

Is your restaurant outgrowing its systems?


We’d be glad to talk it through. Tell us how your branches run today, and we’ll show you what one system could look like for you.

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