“As we began to expand our business across multiple towns and cities, we quickly realised that we needed a system that would allow our head office team to centrally monitor key information. Kobas takes care of our recruitment, staffing, payroll, stock management, cash management, and customer loyalty, allowing our teams in the venues to focus on our customers. From the day we first enquired, James and the team have been on hand to help and support our business growth.”
Ash Hardy
Operations Director, Fine & Country Inns
Success Stories
About
Contemporary pubs across the Yorkshire countryside
Powered by Kobas since 2020
Venues
Sector: Pub group
3 venues across the UK
Featured products
Hospitality EPoS | Stock Control | Recipe Engineering | Customer Interaction Centre | Recruitment | Insights
The Fine & Country Inns group offers quality destination dining at a growing number of contemporary venues across the Yorkshire countryside.
In 2014, the directors had a vision to introduce venues that could be at the heart of a community in small villages and semi-rural locations. After continued success with their first venue, The Stafford Arms, the Fine & Country Inns group emerged and has since grown to three trading locations across the North.
At each venue, customers are guaranteed to experience fresh food, quality drinks, a variety of events and exceptional hospitality. All in all, expect to find venues that can be enjoyed all year round and for any occasion.
As a testament to what they do and how well they do it, The Stafford Arms has previously been nominated as the Best Pub in Yorkshire and many of the venues have been highlighted in The Good Pub guide – cheers to that!
Technology challenges
When starting their journey as a single site operation, the team at Fine & Country Inns invested in an off-the-shelf EPoS system with basic sales processing functionality. The limited product stack resulted in inaccuracies across cash management tasks due to working from spreadsheets – a labour intensive and inefficient way to manage data for any growing operation.
To combat the missing pieces, the team deployed several standalone platforms alongside their EPoS system, including stock control and staff management. Unfortunately, having these separate and unconnected platforms in place meant that they encountered inefficiencies along with additional operating costs.
Sourcing insight on business performance also became challenging, with the team gathering information from several systems with different data formats. The directors identified the system wasn’t going to be a long-term solution that could support their evolving requirements.
Finding a connected system to deploy across the estate
It became clear that consolidating software platforms was the way forward for Fine & Country Inns and so, head office began the search for a complete hospitality system.
To ensure the final decision was right for the business and its future, several months were spent researching the market through trade press, exhibitions and industry recommendations. After demonstrations of the shortlisted systems, the team made evaluations based on the costs, return on investment, efficiency, functionality, development approach, and even the general feel for the company as a long-term technology partner. The connected approach of Kobas and its platforms was exactly what Fine & Country Inns needed and was selected in 2020 on that basis.
Fine & Country Inns benefit from:
Today, the team utilise many of the platforms available across the Kobas product suite, with the flexibility to add to their tech stack with additional platforms as they continue to grow.
• Robust hospitality EPoS system packed with features to increase efficiency during service.
• Reporting tools to provide head office and management with insight into operational performance in minutes and from any internet-connected device.
• Team management platforms, helping to streamline processes by consolidating the onboarding process, rota management, holidays, retention and more, within one system.
