In this episode of The Gross Profit Podcast, James Kennedy chats to fellow Irish SaaS entrepreneur Patrick McDermott, CEO at DigiTally.
Patrick’s digital stocktaking tool helps multi-site food businesses save time, reduce food waste and improve margins. In short, they do this by enabling businesses to count, collate and report on their food and beverage gross profit margins.
Patrick talks about his background, how DigiTally started, what DigiTally does, the ups and downs of a life spent managing inventory and what lies ahead for his B2B SaaS company.
If you’re a SAAS founder or financial professional, listen in and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.
What is DigiTally?
DigiTally is a SaaS company that digitises the inventory control process and the recording of food waste. As we all know, food is perishable and doesn’t always have barcodes, so what DigiTally are able to do is digitise a manual process and make the information significantly more trustworthy. CFOs can see their information all on one dashboard so they can make decisions more quickly. This allows them to have more confidence in the data presented to them and spend less time analysing it.
Patrick’s background is in hospitality, cruise ships and inventory control. He has a stock taking business in Ireland that has 50 employees that go all over the country scanning barcodes and delivering stock valuations. DigiTally is all of that experience being taken and made into an online product so that people can do it themselves, this helps with margins, food waste and ESG.
Life Without DigiTally
According to Patrick, businesses would be receiving ongoing reports about their profitability (their gross profit margin) and about their stock levels, but these reports would have been generated manually and then information is viewed by the site manager, the operations manager and finally by the head of finance.
Essentially what would have happened would have been that using an excel sheet to manage the pricing of the raw ingredients, would have led to each site having to be responsible for updating their own version. For example, a box of bacon would be 10 kilos in a freezer and 5 pounds in a fridge. As it can be recorded in kilos or pounds, if someone puts the wrong values into each site, it can damage the closing stock figure. Employees at a senior level, will then use this information to make incorrect decisions.
With DigiTally discrepancies will be spotted within 20 seconds, so it doesn’t affect more and more people within the company.
“Garbage In, Garbage Out”
At ProcurementExpress.com, we agree that if the data being inputted is wrong, it’s impossible to make good decisions using it, which is why we sell the purchasing software that we have developed.
Advantages of Using DigiTally
- An increase in margin
- A substantial amount of time saved
- A reduction in food waste
For example, there was an average margin increase across all sites of over 1.1%. There were over 80,000 pieces of paper saved per year and there was a saving of over 25,000 hours! The saving of hours is crucial to the productivity of your teams.
ProcurementExpress.com also values saving time. If you free people’s time with our purchasing order software and let them take a hold on the purchasing management, they can be more strategic with what they’re doing or they can add value in other ways.
In addition to this, sometimes it’s easier to retain people because the job isn’t as laborious and it’s faster to onboard people. Time is a great equaliser and we all have the same amount of it. DigiTally have found that a lot of their customers are so profit margin focused and they find staffing more and more difficult. Many businesses are closing because there aren’t enough staff. It is important that staff don’t spend too much time on low value tasks, like counting stock for example. There’s no value in counting stock, but if it’s not done properly, there’s a serious problem because that affects your profit margin.
What Exactly Makes DigiTally More Accurate Than Using A Spreadsheet?
Imagine this – a business has 10,000 products across all of their sites. DigiTally then takes the file with the inventory for these products on it and they put it on the cloud. Then, every site is using that file and when it comes to counting inventory. They can even rearrange it to see inventory in accordance with the shelves. Most importantly, they can count inventory incredibly quickly. When they’re done, they just need to press “Sync” and it’s then all on the cloud, allowing a site manager to now see if there is a counting discrepancy much clearer. They also have a system called “Dynamic Headings”, where customers can see what was counted last time vs what was counted this time and what the quantity difference is.
Understanding the importance of purchasing management and inventory control is crucial to a business’ success. So, if you’re looking for spend management software, check out our website and if you’re looking for inventory control software, check out DigiTally.Io!
