UK restaurant group gets 2 days a week back, no new hire

Ask Ben Todd what tofu has done for Open Restaurant Group, and he’ll give you a number.

“Generally it has saved me so much time… We’ve got, like, nine restaurants. We’ve got 14 businesses… It saves me like two days a week, I would say.”

This is the story of a restaurant group that keeps growing without growing its finance team, and of the day Ben said they had “employed tofu” instead.

Nine restaurants, 14 different businesses

Sam and Emma Morgan run Open Restaurant Group, and chef Andrew Sheridan is the third director. The flagship, 8 by Andrew Sheridan in Liverpool, is a tasting menu restaurant listed in the Michelin Guide.

There are nine restaurants across England and Wales, and the group works hard to keep them different.

“We are a group, but they’re nine separate restaurants. Different brands, different identities, different concepts as well.”

A couple serve tasting menus. A couple serve small plates. One cooks on an open grill, and Bracebridge sits in the middle of a park. All told, Ben looks after the books for 14 businesses, each with its own suppliers, its own invoices and its own ledger in Xero.

A job that might blow your head off

Ben has worked for the group for four years, and in his current role for about 18 months. He works in business support, which means the finance comes first and everything else comes second.

“I also get messages about the dishwasher’s blown up… I’ll get a sort of, like, a random side quest to do daily.”

His main job is the money. Chefs order steaks, suppliers send invoices, and Ben gets every bill into Xero and paid. He looks after financial planning for the whole group too.

“If you were to come and do my job for a day, it might blow your head off.”

A whole day in Xero’s drafts

Before tofu, suppliers sent their invoices to Xero’s own email address. Each one landed as a draft bill, and then the real work started.

“We’d then go into the drafts on Xero, code it, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it would take a whole day.”

Even then, nobody coded bills line by line. There wasn’t time. The team split each invoice into a few broad buckets, such as food with VAT, food without VAT and cleaning products, and moved on.

“If we were doing it line by line, it would have taken two days to do it.”

“That could save us”

The group reviews its tech stack regularly. A Google search turned up tofu, and they booked an intro call with Chelsea from tofu’s UK team. It didn’t take Ben long to see what it meant for his week.

“We were like, actually… that could save us. It’s essentially saved us hiring a member of staff. That’s the reality of it.”

He means it literally. Without tofu, he says, the group would need a second person on bills.

“I’d have to have somebody else just doing loads of boring, boring financial administration.”

From the chef’s card to Xero, on WhatsApp

tofu went live for the group on 6 August 2026, starting with Black & Green. Most of the others followed on 20 August.

Bills now reach tofu in two ways. Suppliers email them in, and the team sends the rest on WhatsApp. That includes the receipts that pile up when chefs pay on the company card.

“Oh, chef bought this on the card. Chef bought that on the card. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’ll just send it into the WhatsApp and then it just does it all for me.”

tofu reads each document, codes it line by line and sends the bill to Xero. Ben matches it to the bank feed there and pays suppliers through open banking.

By 23 October, the group had sent tofu more than 1,800 documents. About two thirds came by email and a third by WhatsApp. Only 19 were uploaded by hand.

Mondays, budgets and every line

Ben reviews tofu’s work once a week, usually on a Monday, and uses it to track the week before against budget.

“We can look at what was spent the week before and then track it… That’s how we do our weekly budgets.”

Because tofu codes line by line, not just the total, the numbers say far more than they used to. It’s one of the things his boss likes most.

“One of the things that my boss is really happy about is the fact that it is line by line. So he can go… Restaurant 8 have ordered, you know, 400 steaks this year or whatever.”

The bills Ben has reviewed so far carry 7,718 lines, and 99% of them are coded to an account. Give it a few more months, he says, and that detail will show where the group can save, like switching to a cheaper gin at one site.

“The line by line that tofu has done for us gives better reading of the data, if you like, more analytical side of it.”

Train it, then it knows

The first couple of weeks, Ben says, were about learning a new system. When a new restaurant came on board, he trained tofu hard, adding knowledge cards and telling it to extract again until it got things right.

“You’ve just got to hammer the AI, basically. You’ve got to train, train, train, train, train the AI. But then once it’s got it, it’s got it. It’s done.”

Every correction teaches tofu for next time. And new restaurants are quick to add, too. Seel & Slater in Liverpool was set up in tofu 17 days before it opened on 9 October.

“Really easy… It’s easy to add the entity, you link it to Xero. Like I said, you just train the AI, extract it… It was really easy.”

Room to improve

Ben uses tofu every day, so he has notes. He’d like WhatsApp uploads to show who sent each one, so his colleagues can tell where a bill came from. And when someone emails tofu with nothing attached, he thinks the sender should get the reply, not him.

“From my point of view, I use tofu every day, give or take, and I think it’s brilliant and I think it’s helped us massively. But yeah, you can always improve, right?”

When something has gone wrong, it’s been fixed. “Everything we’ve ever asked has been sorted,” he says.

Nothing else came close

The group looks at a lot of software. Ben remembers looking at another tool in January, though not its name.

“We look at so much, but nothing has touched the surface that this has.”

And the group is still growing, with more openings planned.

“We want to continue growing. And obviously tofu will be part of that.”

Asked to sum tofu up in one sentence, Ben came back to where he started: without it, they would have hired someone. A few minutes later, he wrote our tagline for us.

“Maybe that should be the tagline… I didn’t want to manage a member of staff. So we employed tofu.”

Open Restaurant Group uses tofu for supplier bills in Xero across 14 businesses. tofu reads invoices, receipts and bank statements, codes every line the way your team would, and learns from each correction. It is trusted by 5,000+ end clients in 100+ countries and used by 7 of the top 10 global accounting networks. Book a demo.