Founder POV: Here's what I've learned working 20 years with some of the UK's best Hospitality Operators.

This article is adapted from a LinkedIn post by Robbie Francis, Founder of Hops.

Here's what I've learned working 20 years with some of the UK's best Hospitality Operators.

There's almost nothing more important than understanding & protecting margins. So here is exactly what you need to do to understand where the leakage is.

Here is a list of every place margin leaks in the ordering and procurement process, and what you can do about it:

🛒 Contextual Ordering  Most systems give you a purchase order. Nothing else.

Order with context: current stock levels, typical weekly usage, price per gram across every supplier. Ordering without that info is just guessing, and ordering mistakes destroy margin before the order even goes out.

🛡️ Authorisations Authorisations aren't really about approvals....they're about context. A sous chef can't place orders because they haven't done 50 Friday nights yet. They don't have the operational context.

Authorisations are the mechanism that protects your margin until they do. Most operations apply this too late: they authorise payments, not orders. By then the goods have arrived, been used and the damage is done.

🤝 Supplier Management Most operations manage suppliers across WhatsApp, spreadsheets and memory.

Centralise everything: cut-off times, spend by supplier, contact hierarchies. When you can see every supplier that stocks an ingredient and what each charges per gram, you have the info to make better buying decisions and data to negotiate prices.

📦 Supplier Products vs Inventory Items Most systems plug supplier products directly into recipes. Switch suppliers and you're rewriting 40 recipes, so chefs don't switch, even when a better price exists.

Separate what you buy from what you use, and changing supplier becomes a single click: the system recalculates the GP of every dish that ingredient touches instantly.

🚪 Deliveries Most platforms treat a delivery as one event: it arrives, it's logged, it's done.

Split it: confirm the quantity first, confirm the price second. Between 2-4% of all F&B deliveries have something wrong with them. For a £10M operator, that's £300,000 a year in delivery discrepancies going unrecovered.

💰 Credit Notes Most operators spot delivery discrepancies and do nothing about them. A credit note that isn't chased recovers nothing.

Hops automates the full loop: creates the credit note, emails the supplier to claim it & pushes it to your accounting platform so finance has full visibility. Spotting the discrepancy is only half the job, closing the loop is the other half.

✅ Authorisations In Practice Most approval processes stall because the approver isn't at their desk.

Dynamic escalation and mobile approvals mean a £4K order landing at 8pm on a Friday gets actioned in 60 seconds, not Monday morning.

This is exactly what we built Hops® to solve: margin protected at every stage of ordering and procurement.

Interested in the FULL breakdown? 👉 https://lnkd.in/e8xMrahK

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About Robbie Francis
Robbie Francis is the Founder of Hops. He has spent years building and implementing hospitality technology with operators, focused on simplifying back-of-house operations across inventory and finance.

Follow Robbie on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robbiefrancis

View the original LinkedIn post: Here's what I've learned working 20 years with some of the UK's best Hospitality Operators.