AIR × PLATE IT FORWARD

What began with one restaurant has grown into a group of social enterprise venues, including Colombo Social, Kyiv Social and Kabul Social, alongside catering and other hospitality operations. Across the group, Plate It Forward creates employment and training pathways for people facing barriers to work while using food to bring communities together.

As that impact grew, so did the complexity behind the business.

The Challenge

Plate It Forward had evolved into a large multi-entity hospitality group, with employees working across different venues and entities, increasing transaction volumes and a finance function that needed to keep pace with the organisation’s growth.

Payroll had become increasingly complex. Team members could work across multiple entities and historical pay structures had evolved differently across the group, making consistency and accuracy more difficult as the workforce expanded.

The way financial information flowed through the business also created challenges. Daily sales from the venues were being manually journaled into the accounting system, sometimes weekly or fortnightly. In hospitality, where sales, wages and margins can move quickly, that delay made it harder to get an accurate and timely view of performance.

There were also historical balance sheet items that required attention, including the treatment of fixed assets. Without a clean and well-supported balance sheet, the quality of the financial information available to management and external stakeholders was limited.

For a growing organisation operating multiple venues and entities, these were no longer simply accounting issues. They affected how quickly the team could make decisions, manage cashflow and demonstrate the financial position of the group when opportunities arose.

The Solution

Air worked with Plate It Forward to strengthen the finance function across the group and create processes that could scale with the organisation.

A key focus was payroll. Air helped standardise the payroll framework across the different entities, bringing greater consistency to pay rates and the treatment of employees working across multiple parts of the group. Combined with ongoing payroll processing, STP and superannuation support, this created a more reliable and scalable payroll environment as the team continued to grow.

Air also changed the way venue sales flowed into the accounts. Rather than relying on manual journals entered periodically, daily POS data was integrated into the finance system. This gave the team much more current visibility over revenue and reduced the lag between what was happening in the restaurants and what was reflected in the financial reporting.

Behind the scenes, Air worked through the balance sheet and corrected historical items, including the reporting of fixed assets. Cleaning up the underlying financial records created a clearer and more reliable picture of the group’s financial position.

That work ultimately had a commercial impact beyond the finance function. With stronger financial information and a more robust balance sheet, Plate It Forward was able to obtain external finance that had previously been difficult to secure.

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