Muchacha

Muchacha is a well-run restaurant with steady sales. Its financial side, however, depended on manual spreadsheets, operational memory, and the partners’ intuition. Financial information was organized one sheet per month: each period lived in its own tab.

That format had real costs. Comparing months was hard, the history was scattered, and trends were invisible. Every calculation had to be redone by hand, and dynamic metrics couldn’t be built. On top of that, the burden of manual entry meant the tool itself was used less.

The data was there. What was missing was a structure to bring it together and turn it into useful information for decisions.

The request was clear: turn the spreadsheet into the business’s central management tool. The question was how to structure it so it would work for years, not just the current month.

We agreed to redesign it as an integrated database, ordered chronologically. Every record has a date and feeds monthly, weekly, and historical analysis, without duplicate sheets or redone calculations.

All sources in one place. We redesigned the spreadsheet as a single chronological database that brings together what used to be scattered: sales and tax exported from Loyverse, transactions from three bank accounts classified by category, cash, and staff, where hours worked feed the payroll and tax calculations. We added the daily dollar exchange rate, so each transaction uses the rate from the day it happened, and consolidated everything into an income statement.

The history, rebuilt transaction by transaction. So the business wouldn’t start without history, we rebuilt and categorized bank transactions back to November 2021: thousands of transactions downloaded from each bank and classified one by one. Most of the history came from real bank data. We only estimated the cash transactions that hadn’t been recorded in any source, and flagged them as estimates.

Built around how the team works. We started with interviews to understand how the team preferred to handle each component, and worked from sample files of their own financial sources. We delivered the tool in a live meeting with an explainer video, and made final adjustments based on real use.

A process that doesn’t depend on whoever built it. We left an instructions sheet with the order and frequency for updating each tab, so the spreadsheet can be maintained without depending on us.

Muchacha went from loose monthly sheets to an integrated, continuous database. And it didn’t start empty: it went live with years of history already categorized.

Today it can look up that history, compare periods, and build metrics on a single source. The update process is documented, which reduces manual work and reliance on operational memory.

What’s next. Building actual costing and improving margins belong to a later stage, handled outside this project.