How The Lodge Bars is running hospitality with the same discipline and control as retail

The Lodge Bars is the hospitality arm of Rodd & Gunn, part of a wider business known for high standards, strong systems and disciplined execution.

But hospitality does not always behave like the rest of a business.

Even inside a well-run group, the hospitality side can get messy fast. Supplier invoices live in one place, recipes in another, spreadsheets split out by venue, and reporting spread across separate kitchen, bar and labour tools. That was the reality for The Lodge Bars. For a business used to operating with clarity and control, it created a disconnect between how they wanted to run and what their hospitality systems actually allowed.

For Matt Goodison, Country Manager NZ, the issue was not a lack of effort or experience. It was the fact that there was too much manual work and too many moving parts. Spreadsheets could do the job up to a point, but once supplier pricing started shifting, confidence in the numbers dropped away quickly. Making sure cost of goods and labour were accurate was always a challenge, especially when one broken formula could throw off the whole picture.

So what was the real frustration?

Mostly, it was time.

Hospitality managers should be on the floor or in the kitchen, with their teams, close to their customers. Instead, too much energy was going into chasing suppliers, checking invoices, and trying to keep older documents accurate. It was too time consuming. The bigger issue underneath all of that, was what the time was being taken away from. In hospitality, every hour spent buried in admin is an hour not spent leading and motivating the team or improving the guest experience.

That friction was even more obvious because The Lodge Bars was operating across Australia and New Zealand. It was not just about understanding one venue. It was about trying to get a clear view across the group while the information sat in too many different places. Matt wanted a way to consolidate everything and see the business properly, venue by venue and consolidated as a whole.

How did you go about solving this?

The business did not need more software. It needed control.

Loaded gave The Lodge Bars one place to understand what was happening across the group. Instead of piecing together performance from spreadsheets, supplier invoices and disconnected reports, the team could see live numbers coming through in one place. That visibility now stretches across food and beverage splits, recipes, cost of goods, sales performance, and team performance. As Matt explains, Loaded gives him one place to find everything from rostering and recipes through to what is selling, what is not, and where teams need more support. Even better, he’s confident that it is accurate.

That shift matters because better visibility changes the speed and quality of decision-making. When numbers are live, operators can act earlier. When everyone is looking at the same version of the truth, it becomes much easier to see where the business is tracking well and where something needs attention.

Where has that made the biggest difference?

One of the clearest areas is margin control.

Before AI invoice processing, supplier price changes had to be tracked manually. Someone had to go through invoices line by line, and even then small increases were easy to miss. If price changes are not picked up quickly, margins can slide from 75% to 72, then 70% and on it goes, death by one thousand small cuts. In hospitality, that is not a minor miss. That is the kind of drift that can quietly do real damage to the bottom line if no one catches it early.

With AI invoice processing, The Lodge Bars now has a much better way to keep costings current. Recipes can stay aligned with supplier changes, and the team has far more confidence that budgets, margins and cost of goods are grounded in what is actually happening, not what was true a few weeks ago.

That confidence is important because, before Loaded, Matt says he was never really that confident in the weekly numbers. Like a lot of hospitality leaders, he came into the industry through operations first. The financial side came later. What Loaded has done is remove much of the guesswork and turn the numbers into something clearer, more usable and easier to act on day to day.

Has that changed the way the teams operate?

"100% it has." says Matt.

Good systems should make teams better without overwhelming them. Matt is now able to take the numbers and present them back to venue leaders in a way that is practical. It becomes easier to show where things are going well, where improvements are needed, and what deserves attention next. That means managers can lead with more confidence, and teams can understand performance without being dragged too far away from the floor.

Experience still matters, but numbers do not lie. For The Lodge Bars, Loaded has helped bring those two things together. It supports better operational judgement with better financial visibility (and understanding), which is exactly where strong hospitality businesses want to be.

So what is the story here, really?

It is not just that The Lodge Bars now have better reporting.

It is that it helped bring the hospitality side of the business closer to the standard of control the wider retail group expects. It replaced spreadsheet sprawl, manual price tracking and disconnected systems with a live view of the business that is easier to trust and easier to act on. It reduced admin in the back office, improved visibility across multiple venues, and strengthened control over cost of goods and margins at a time when every point matters.

Most importantly, it gave the team more room to focus on what hospitality is actually about. Better numbers. Better decisions. More time on the floor. More confidence that the business is tracking in the right direction.

For The Lodge Bars, that is the real value of Loaded. It brought control to a part of the business that had become fragmented, and helped the team run hospitality in a way that feels far more aligned with the standards they expect everywhere else.