FineEats Case Study: Food Cost Line by Line with Tofu

Kyri is a qualified accountant with a day job. He lectures at a university. He has three kids.

He also feeds 1,900 of other people's kids. Every school day.

It started with a tender. His wife's family comes from catering. She had run a small school canteen before. Then the canteen at their own children's school came up for bid. They wrote a proposal. They won.

Today FineEats runs the food at four schools in Cyprus. Three sites have their own kitchen. A fourth school has none, so meals arrive twice a day by delivery, ordered through a parent app. Fourteen people work in the business, counting his wife. Not counting Kyri. He is not on the payroll. He does the books at night, after the day job.

There is an armchair in this story. We will get to it.

One line

Food is the whole game in a canteen. Meats. Vegetables. Dry goods. Packaging. It arrives as paper: around 400 supplier invoices a month by his count, 100 a week.

Kyri keyed them in himself. "My weekends were just purely manually keying in," he says. "As a CFO, the last thing you want to be doing is debits and credits. But we do what we must."

Here is the part he laughs about now. Keying every line of every invoice would have eaten his life. So he stopped splitting them. Meat, dry goods and packaging on one invoice went into the books as one line. One expense. He knew what he owed. He knew the VAT. That had to be enough.

"You'd need a pool of five or six people processing. I just can't afford that. And I don't see the value add in it. If it can be automated, then why not?"

So a €40,000 monthly food spend sat in his P&L as a blur. Ten categories of cost, booked as one. The month-end close took a full week. "Forty hours, on my own," he says. And the picture ran six weeks behind, because he had to wait for supplier statements to check his work.

An accountant who cannot see his own food cost. He felt it every month.

The search

He went shopping for software the way he budgets: with questions. The first tool he shortlisted charged extra for the one thing he needed most: line-by-line capture. The price moved when his volume moved. "Give me a price so I can budget," he says. "If I don't know what basic costs are, how am I going to manage my business?"

He passed. Then Tofu came along.

Minutes

Tofu is an AI bookkeeping tool used by 5,000+ companies across 50 countries. Kyri met it through Jay on the Tofu team. There was no setup project. No mapping his chart of accounts.

"We logged on with Jay, and within minutes it was already looking at my historical data. It knew this supplier, this cost centre, this line."

An accountant does not hand over the books on a promise. So he checked everything.

"The first month we were looking at an 80 to 85 percent accuracy. The second month it was up to 90 something. Now I'm looking at a 99."

He still spot-checks.

"I'm almost confident enough to just accept whatever Tofu's told me."

Almost. He is still an accountant.

When something snags, he messages the team on WhatsApp. "Soon as I got a problem on the WhatsApp, it's dealt," he says.

What the P&L says now

His chart of accounts splits cost of goods into ten or twelve lines. Meats. Packaging. Dry goods. Vegetables. Tofu reads each invoice, line by line, and posts each line to the right code in QuickBooks. Credit card spend and small assets go through the same door.

"Because it's line by line, my P&L at the end of the month is a lot more accurate. Which is fantastic."

Accurate has uses. FineEats locks many supplier prices at the start of the school year. Certain meats are a fixed price per kilogram. Before, a quiet price rise could hide inside a lump sum for months. Now the line sits in the books, next to the line from last month. He can pick up the phone.

The numbers

And the time. By Kyri's account, the books now take 40 minutes to an hour a week, plus about an hour at month end. "I'm talking about a five hour process, maybe six hour process, over the month," he says. The close alone used to take 40.

"I just laugh when I think what I was going through," he says.

The armchair

Here is the armchair.

On Friday, Kyri scans the week's invoices and uploads the pack to Tofu. Then he sits in his Lazy Boy in front of the TV. Arsenal, if the fixture list is kind. On the screen, each invoice sits next to what Tofu read from it. He watches both at once.

"I don't need to be focused," he says, "because I'm confident in the AI capturing the data as it should be."

The weekends belong to his family again.

September

School starts again in September. So does the next step. Each kitchen will photograph its invoices into WhatsApp on delivery day, straight into Tofu. "It's easier to do ten invoices a night than a hundred over the weekend," he says. He has tested it. "It's going to work for me."

Then he gets live purchase data, every day.

"It helps me with cash flow planning, it helps me with cost control, it helps me with many, many things."

He is thinking of going paperless after that. The data is in QuickBooks, posted line by line. The paper is a habit.

One line used to be enough. It is not anymore.