Benjamin Pace
— CFO,
Floor Coverings International
For a growing franchise brand, processes that work at 100 locations rarely work at 300, and financial reporting is no exception.
When Benjamin Pace joined Floor Coverings International as CFO in 2020, the organization had approximately 125 franchisees. Today, it has grown to nearly 300. As the brand expanded, the finance team recognized that spreadsheet-based processes and manual financial data collection would not scale with it.
Floor Coverings International partnered with Qvinci to automate financial data collection, gain more timely visibility into franchise performance, and give its coaches and franchisees actionable insights they could use to improve profitability.
As Pace explains, “That’s one of the reasons we partnered with Qvinci in the first place, so that we could get better data and get it in real time.”
Today, Qvinci provides Floor Coverings International with a scalable financial performance infrastructure that supports daily data visibility, benchmarking, KPI analysis, automated reporting, at-risk identification, budgeting, forecasting, and more productive coaching conversations across the organization.
When Pace joined Floor Coverings International, the brand was already growing, but many of its financial processes were still dependent on spreadsheets and hands-on work.
At a smaller scale, those processes could be managed, but a process that works across the first 100 locations becomes increasingly impractical as a brand grows into the hundreds or thousands.
As Floor Coverings International continued to grow, however, the finance team needed a more scalable way to:
The challenge went beyond administrative efficiency. Floor Coverings International needed financial information quickly enough to identify trends, understand franchisee performance, and intervene while there was still time to affect the outcome.
If you’re waiting 15 to 30 days to figure out where you are, you’re actually falling behind on being able to do anything to affect the rest of the year.”
— Benjamin Pace
CFO,
Floor Coverings International
The company also needed a way to make financial information useful to franchise owners who may not have deep accounting expertise. Traditional financial statements alone were not enough. Franchisees needed clear KPIs, benchmarks, and visual indicators that made it easier to understand what was working, what was not, and where to focus next.
Floor Coverings International adopted Qvinci to move from a hands-on financial process toward a more automated model capable of scaling with the organization.
Rather than requiring the brand to manually aggregate data or forcing franchisees into a complex new accounting environment, Qvinci provided a patented process to bring financial information together and turn it into actionable insights for different stakeholders.
For Pace, the value is not simply collecting financial data, it’s being able to use that data to improve franchisee performance: “When you’re using it for coaching, you can actually bring them along and they want to be actively involved.”
That distinction has been important to franchisee adoption. Financial reporting is not positioned simply as a compliance requirement. Floor Coverings International uses the information to help owners understand and improve their businesses, creating a clearer value exchange between the franchisee and franchisor, which feel much less like a “Big Brother” relationship for the owners.
One of Floor Coverings International’s primary objectives was eliminating dependence on manual data aggregation.
Qvinci enables franchise financial data to be synced automatically, giving the corporate team access to updated information without waiting for franchisees to submit reports or requiring employees to compile spreadsheets manually.
Floor Coverings International also uses Qvinci’s API with its internal Power BI reporting environment. According to Pace, the company’s reporting refreshes each morning, allowing the organization to continually incorporate updated financial and KPI information.
That increased timeliness makes the finance and operations teams more agile. Instead of discovering a problem weeks after the fact, they can identify unfavorable movement earlier and begin rectifying it before it develops into a critical problem.
“At the franchise level, we’re not calling up franchisees and saying, ‘Hey, I need you to send in your P&L.’ And as a franchisee, every morning when I get up, I get an email that says my data has synced to Qvinci. I know it’s there and I know it’s ready to go.” – John Babcock
Effective coaching depends on more than having access to data. Franchise owners also need to understand what the data means.
Floor Coverings International uses Qvinci’s KPI and business intelligence capabilities to focus franchisees on the financial measures that matter most to their businesses, including:
Rather than overwhelming owners with every possible account or metric, the company can provide role-based views and use Qvinci’s red-and-green visual indicators to make favorable (green) and unfavorable (red) performance easier to understand.
For Pace, the goal is to help franchisees focus on the handful of KPIs capable of meaningfully moving their businesses forward. That makes financial conversations more accessible while giving coaches a common foundation for discussing performance.
Benchmarking has become particularly valuable as the Floor Coverings International brand has grown.
With comparable financial data available across the system, franchisees can better understand how their businesses perform relative to their peers and what stronger performance can look like. For high-performing franchisees in particular, Pace has seen benchmarking create impactful motivation.
“Where the juice is with this [benchmarking] is with your top performers.”
— Benjamin Pace
Floor Coverings International uses rankings and benchmarking with its top-performing groups to create healthy competition and help owners identify additional opportunities for improvement.
According to Pace, moving a franchisee ranked tenth closer to the performance of the system’s number-one operator can materially contribute to systemwide sales. Strong financial performance can also help create owners who are better positioned to reinvest in their businesses or acquire additional locations.
Qvinci also helps Floor Coverings International translate financial performance into specific operational conversations.
One example is Qvinci’s Break-Even and What-If Analysis. Floor Coverings International combines financial information with operational KPIs to demonstrate how changes in areas such as close rates, gross margin, or marketing spend could affect overall profitability.
For franchise owners who are less financially sophisticated, seeing those relationships can create an important connection between daily operating decisions and bottom-line results. According to Pace, “Being able to move those levers for them creates that aha moment that, oh my God, if I can just do a couple of things in my business, my profitability goes way up.”
Rather than simply telling an owner that a metric needs improvement, coaches can demonstrate why it matters and how changing it could affect the business.
That helps turn financial reporting from a retrospective exercise into an actionable coaching tool.
As Floor Coverings International matured, identifying franchisees at risk became increasingly important.
The organization uses financial indicators, particularly gross margin, to identify locations that may require intervention. Pace noted that when gross margin drops below the level required for viable unit economics, the team knows that the location may face serious challenges.
Staffing costs and marketing spend can provide additional early warning signals.
That visibility helps Floor Coverings International move beyond discovering problems after a franchisee is already in distress. Instead, teams proactively identify unfavorable trends and engage owners earlier.
The goal is to reduce preventable franchise terminations or business failures while giving franchisees a better opportunity to course-correct.
Qvinci was implemented when Floor Coverings International had roughly 125 franchisees. The system has since grown to nearly 300.
During that growth, the brand has been able to evolve its Standard Chart of Accounts, adjust mappings, refine KPIs and benchmarks, and customize the information different users receive. That flexibility has allowed Floor Coverings International’s financial performance management approach to mature alongside the organization.
It has also empowered the company to devote more resources to analysis and profitability rather than data collection. Pace noted that Floor Coverings International has created a dedicated profitability role focused on financial reviews and helping franchisees better understand their performance.
For Pace, that focus gets to the heart of profitable franchise expansion. As he explains, “You can’t have franchisees scale if they’re not making money. It just won’t work.”
Qvinci® Data automatically collects, consolidates, and maps franchise location financial data to a brand-defined Standard Chart of Accounts. Combined with Qvinci® Intelligence’s predictive analytics and interactive inquiry capabilities, it gives Floor Coverings International a more scalable approach to financial management. The result is greater visibility into franchisee performance and more actionable support across the brand.
Key benefits include:
For Floor Coverings International, Qvinci has become more than a financial reporting solution. It provides the data foundation the brand uses to support financial reviews, benchmarking, franchisee coaching, risk identification, budgeting, forecasting, and scalable growth.
The technology matters—but Pace emphasizes that successful adoption ultimately depends on showing franchisees why the information benefits them.
“The why needs to be about what they [franchisees] get out of it too.”
— Benjamin Pace
When franchisees understand that financial visibility is intended to help them become more profitable, not simply satisfy a resented corporate requirement, the relationship changes. Data becomes a shared resource for better decisions, stronger coaching, and sustainable growth.
After more than six years of using the platform, Pace summarized his view of Qvinci as, “It’s one of the best tools we’ve seen.”
For a franchise brand that has more than doubled in size since 2020, that scalable combination of automation, visibility, and actionable financial intelligence helps Floor Coverings International keep the focus on helping franchise owners build stronger, more profitable businesses.
Watch Zachary Stein, Financial Analyst with Paul Davis Restoration, share with Brad Adams, Qvinci CEO, President, and Chairman, why their franchise uses Qvinci.
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