How Alchemy & I Group (UK/NZ Salon Group) Stopped Typing Its Receipts

Renallie Dayrit has never lived in England.

You would not guess it on a call. Two years of daily meetings with a British team will do that to a voice. You start to talk the way they talk, Rena says, or they will not get what you mean.

Rena works near Manila, on UK hours. The group she serves runs luxury salons and spas across five English towns: London, Marlow, Berkhamsted, Leighton Buzzard and Windsor. There is a clinic branch in New Zealand too. She saw the sites in person for the first time this May. She stayed a month and met everyone.

Her job covers all of it. We will get to the receipts.

Everything finance? It's probably me

Rena took a degree in management accounting. Then she made a choice most graduates do not. She skipped the CPA license. She did not want to tie herself to accounting. She wanted the whole business.

The whole business found her. Alchemy & I Group sells what Rena calls a complete pampering and wellness experience. Hair. Spa. Wellness. A finance manager works one day a week. Everything else lands on Rena. Cash flow. Budgets. Cost analysis. The books. "Anything finance related, day to day," she says, "it's probably me."

What a pampering empire buys

Picture the purchases. Wine and cocktails served while your hair is done. Fresh herbs, mints and seeds, bought again and again, because everything is fresh. Salon supplies. Spa supplies. In New Zealand, a weekly grocery run with a long list of items.

Every purchase prints a receipt. Rena puts the group's pile at 300 to 400 a month.

Here is what those receipts used to demand. Staff collected them by hand and posted them to Slack. Her team downloaded each one and opened a split screen next to Xero. Then they typed every line. Item by item. Code by code. The group is hands-on with its P&Ls. Every cost goes to its exact account, because the managers see those numbers each month. Nothing could be guessed.

"It's just the same thing all over again. But you have to do it manually."

She carried this alone at the start. The close was due on the third of each month. Back in December, the night before a close, she told our team she was dreading it. Suffering, she says now, had started to feel normal.

The brief from the top

It took her CEO to ask the question. The group wanted AI anywhere it would help. The brief was short: find a tool that makes your day easier.

Rena had been here before. She tried a capture tool once, and she dropped it. It read the documents. It could not keep pace with how the group codes them. Every line to its exact account, checked against last month, because the managers read those P&Ls line by line. A tool that gets you close is a tool you spend your month correcting. Close was not the standard.

So she compared everything she could find. One promise stood out: seamless. "It was the most promising," she says. She gave it a try.

That was December. The tool was Tofu.

Drag, drop, review, verify

The old job was typing. The new job is checking.

Documents land in Tofu by email or a drag and drop. Tofu reads every line: the spa supplies, the salon stock, the mint for the cocktails. It codes each one to the account the last one went to. The Xero connection, in Rena's words, "was very easy."

Ask Rena to describe a month end now and she counts it on one hand.

"Now it's just drag, drop, wait, extract. Then review, cross-check, verify. Just that."

It remembers what was before

The part she talks about most is memory.

"Tofu based all of the extractions on previous data. It's just copying what was before."

Sameness was the villain. Now it is the engine. The hundredth receipt for mint takes no teaching, because the first one showed Tofu where mint goes.

That changed how she runs her team. New joiners used to need a tour of the chart of accounts. Not anymore.

"I don't even need to teach you where you should put all these things. Tofu does it for you."

Her team proved it. The staff she moved onto bookkeeping have no accounting or finance background. She offered them formal Tofu training. They turned it down. "It's actually pretty easy to use," they told her. They now use Tofu more than she does.

Rena was the first in the group to earn Tofu certification. Her team is going for it too. It looks good on a LinkedIn profile, she tells them.

The extra step they choose

Here is the tell.

For card spending in the UK, the group runs a digital payments app. Staff pay by phone. The app asks for a photo of the receipt at the till, before the moment passes. No photo, no mystery purchases. On payments and accountability, it earns its keep.

The receipts still end up in Tofu.

The app reads a simple receipt fine. The long ones give it trouble, the purchases with rows and rows of line items. So Rena's team downloads those documents from the payment app and drags them into Tofu to be read and coded. An extra step, chosen on purpose.

Capture was never the hard part. Reading every line and putting it on the right account is. That is the job the group gives to Tofu.

The numbers

Alchemy & I Group went live with Tofu on December 4. Here is what Tofu's production records show since then, as of mid-August.

The group has posted 1,080 supplier bills to Xero through Tofu. Close to 3,500 line items were read and coded on those bills. December closed with 34 documents. March reached 82. April jumped to 218. The months since have held between 140 and 200, and the middle of August had passed 100. Seven of the group's eight connected entities now run bills through Tofu, by Rena's count. The list runs from the UK flagship to the New Zealand clinics.

Simple, efficient, time saving

Rena still presents the P&Ls to managers every month. The numbers are the same numbers. The hours are not. What she saves goes to the work she skipped the CPA for: cash flow, budgets, analysis, the business itself.

Ask what she would tell another group running several sites, and she does not pause.

"Tofu is very simple. It's very easy to navigate and use. It's beginner friendly. Even without a finance or accounting background, you can use it. It's effective, it's efficient, and it's really time saving."

She is not finished with it, either. "I'm looking forward to how much more we can integrate Tofu with our systems," she says. "It's really an excellent app for us."

Two years of calls gave Rena her team's voice. Eight months of Tofu gave the team back its month end. The deadline is still the third. The dread did not survive December.