The Blackburn Group

Scaffold

Scaffold

The operating system for operating your business systems.

POS
$4,231
Scheduling
12 shifts
Accounting
$84,210
Reviews
4.6
Inventory
Bourbon
Vodka
Lager

SCAFFOLD

Dashboards
Weekly recap
Alerts
Approvals

What’s in Scaffold

Modules

Operations Pulse

Your numbers, all in one place.

Operations Pulse is the foundation. We connect to your POS — Toast at launch, others on the roadmap — and pull every sale, every guest, every item into one place. You get sales by daypart, day of week, item, location, and employee. Tender mix. Comps and voids. Tip totals. Multi-location side-by-side when you run more than one room.

What changes day-to-day: your weekly business review writes itself. Monday morning you open one dashboard instead of stitching three. End of month, the trend lines are already there — week-over-week, month-over-month, year-over-year — without anyone touching a spreadsheet.

Reviews

Every review, one feed.

Every review across Google, Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, OpenTable in one feed. We tag them by sentiment and theme — food, service, wait time, ambiance — so you can spot patterns before they cost you. Response time, response rate, rating trends per platform: all tracked.

Replies happen on whatever rhythm fits. At Captain tier, our LLM drafts varied responses for each review (Google’s 2026 policy enforces variation — bulk-templated replies get removed). At every tier you can use manual replies, templates, or our drafts. Approval workflow built in. Nothing publishes without your sign-off when you want it that way.

AP & Vendor

Catch the money you'd miss.

Invoices come in from email, your QBO inbox, or paper you upload. We read them — vendor, line items, totals, due dates — and push them through an approval queue. Once you approve, they flow into QuickBooks Online with the right chart-of-accounts coding. Sync status tracked per invoice.

The reconciliation layer is the quiet win. We match invoices to payments coming out of QBO and flag the leaks: duplicate invoices from the same vendor, duplicate payments on a single bill, overpayments, and payments going out for invoices you never received. Most operators find money the first month it runs.

Labor Watch

Labor cost vs sales — live.

Labor cost against sales, live. Hours scheduled vs hours worked. Overtime caught before the week closes, not after payroll runs. Schedule adherence, no-shows, break compliance, tipped vs non-tipped, wage rate per employee — all of it tracked.

Shift swaps stop happening in group texts. The module routes requests through your scheduling system (7shifts, Toast Payroll, Homebase), finds eligible swappers based on role and overtime limits, notifies them by SMS, captures responses, and queues approvals. When other modules are installed, Labor Watch becomes the audit layer too — POS-to-deposit reconciliation tied to shift windows, POS-to-inventory shrink tied to who was working.

Inventory & Cost

See where the margin leaks.

Stock levels, PAR, reorder points, item-level cost — all tracked per location. As you receive invoices through AP & Vendor, stock increments automatically. Manual counts (full or cycle) reconcile against the running total.

Pour cost variance is the centerpiece for bars. We track what your POS says you sold, multiplied by the recipe BOMs, against what your counts say actually moved. The gap is shrink — over-pours, spillage, waste, theft — broken down by category. For most bars it’s the first time anyone’s quantified the leak.

Menu Performance

Items, ranked by what pays.

Every item on your menu, sorted by what actually makes money. Revenue, COGS (from Inventory & Cost recipe data), contribution margin, volume, and total contribution per item per period. Modifier-driven margin shifts tracked too — that $1 add-on can change everything.

Items get sorted onto the Boston matrix: stars, plowhorses, puzzles, dogs. The matrix isn’t decoration — items migrate over time, and you see it happen. Pricing analysis flags when a cost rose and the price didn’t. Promotional tracking shows whether a comp or feature lifted volume enough to justify the margin hit. At Captain tier, recommendations come with predictive impact — drop X, and Y% of sales shift to these alternatives.

Retail and professional services suites are next. Talk to us if you operate in those spaces and want to shape what we build.

How you buy

Tiers

Three tiers, customer-chosen modules within each. Tiers aren’t “more features locked behind paywalls” — they’re different operating modes. Clarity is data and reports. Cadence adds automation. Captain adds an AI co-pilot that knows your whole business.

Clarity

Entry. Reporting and visibility. Pick 3 modules.

Clarity is the entry tier. You pick three modules from the bar & restaurant catalog. Each module gets its own dashboard — sales, reviews, labor, whatever you chose — and we deliver scheduled reports on the cadence you set. Weekly recaps in your inbox Monday morning. Monthly summaries at month close.

This is the foundation: data captured, surfaced cleanly, no more spreadsheet stitching. No automation, no AI surfaces — those live in higher tiers. But the clarity itself is often the unlock. Once you can see your business, the decisions get easier.

Cadence

Mid-tier. Routine automation. Pick 4 or 5 modules.

Cadence is the operating tier. You pick four or five modules and we add the routine automation layer on top. Scheduled actions: weekly recaps with the right people CC’d, invoice approvals queued to your phone, threshold alerts when labor crosses a number or pour cost drifts. Write-back to the systems you already use — approved invoices flow into QuickBooks, approved swaps push to your scheduler.

The shift is from looking at data to acting on it. Cadence does the routine work so you can focus on the judgment calls.

Captain

Top. ERP-style with an AI co-pilot. All modules.

Captain is the operating system. Every module, all six, fully connected and cross-aware. Four AI surfaces sit on top:

A unified ERP-style dashboard pulling every metric together — labor, sales, inventory, margin, reviews, AP — in one view. An AI chat interface for natural-language questions over your data (“how did our late-night bar sales compare last weekend?”). A proactive intelligence feed that surfaces what matters without being asked. Specialized AI workflows for the hard problems — anomaly detection across systems, menu engineering recommendations with predicted impact, audit pattern detection tying shifts to discrepancies.

This is the tier for operators who want the whole business in one place, with an AI co-pilot that knows it as well as you do.

Beyond the platform

Advisory engagements

Advisory engagements run in parallel to the platform. Same firm, different shape. Hands-on, contingency-priced, focused on moving specific numbers.

The model

Contingency pricing. We get paid on measured improvement.

Advisory engagements are contingency-priced. We agree a KPI baseline with you up front — could be pour cost percentage, labor as a percent of sales, AP cycle time, review rating, whatever lever matters most for your business. Then we work that lever. We bill a percentage of the measured improvement, paid against the baseline.

Zero client risk in the conventional sense. We don’t get paid unless the number moves. Aligned incentives, plainly stated.

Who it fits

Operators who want a specific number moved.

Advisory works best for operators already running Scaffold. The baseline measurement, the lever tracking, the proof of improvement — all of it leans on the data already flowing through the platform. You can engage us for Advisory without Scaffold, but the engagement is faster, sharper, and easier to track when the data is already in one place.

The right operator for Advisory has a specific number they want to move and the willingness to let someone outside their team look hard at why it isn’t moving.

The formal engagement process — discovery, scoping, onboarding, ongoing — lives on the Engagement page.

Baseline → improvement

100Baseline
118Improved

You pay a percentage of the gain. Zero risk.

If you operate a bar or restaurant and your systems can’t keep up with you, Scaffold is built for you.

See how we engage