CASE STUDY: KICCO
From Spreadsheets to Integrated Operations: How Kicco Built Their Business Backbone with Viability
MEET THE VENUE GROUP
Kicco, Adelaide, South Australia
Owner: Tyson Crosby
Tyson owns and operates two venues as part of the wider Kicco franchise. The multi-venue operation had been relying on manual processes and disconnected systems—until Viability became the central nervous system for the entire business.
1.5+ hours
2
venues
4x
The Challenge They Faced
Multi-venue hospitality groups live with a constant friction: rosters written on experience and intuition, with no real-time visibility into labour cost against forecasted revenue. Data lives in multiple places. Award rules get interpreted differently at each venue. Payroll data has to be manually re-entered. A bookkeeper visits weekly to collect invoices and timesheets. By the time anyone sees what the labour cost actually was, the week has passed.
For Kicco, this looked like what it looks like everywhere: spreadsheets managing spreadsheets, no single source of truth, and endless cross-referencing between systems.
How Viability Helped
Viability consolidates everything into one operating system. No more parallel spreadsheets. No more manual re-entry across systems.
For Kicco, this meant:
- One roster, one cost figure – Managers write once. Viability shows labour cost in real time. No discrepancies between what rostering says and what payroll shows.
- Award rules built in – Employee award rules and rates are within Viability and are updated regularly.. Compliance happens automatically. No manual interpretation or fixes.
- Xero integration – Payroll ready data flows directly from Viability into accounting. The bookkeeper visit became unnecessary.
- Self-service onboarding – New staff onboard themselves with email and phone number. Kicco doesn’t re-enter data.
- Staff self-service for leave – Employees log leave requests themselves. Managers see it instantly. No cross-referencing needed.
- Digital payroll from clock-in to clock-out – Every minute is recorded and paid accurately. No 15-minute rounding. No manual timesheets.
The result: what used to be a weekly manual exercise across multiple tools now runs as a single integrated process.
The results
1.5+ hours saved per week
Roster creation time dropped from scattered across multiple tools and manual checks to 30 minutes per store. That’s a minimum of 1.5 hours weekly per venue freed up—time managers can spend on floor and team development, not administration.
One number, one system
Before, spreadsheets showed one figure, payroll showed another. Numbers didn’t match. Now: one source of truth. Labour cost and revenue visible together. No reconciliation after the fact.
Completely digital payroll
No bookkeeper visits. No manual timesheets. No 15-minute rounding rules. Every minute is recorded and paid exactly. Compliance is automatic. Payroll ready data is generated once and flows to Xero with zero re-entry.
Managers moved from reactive to proactive
Instead of finding out after the week what went wrong with labour costs, managers now see the full operating picture before the roster is finalised. The conversation shifts from “Why did we overspend?” to “How do we cost this correctly?”
The integration advantage
Viability talks to Xero. Viability contains up to date government award rules and rates.
Viability reads invoices from a photo or file upload — staff snap it, the data lands in Viability ready to confirm. That ability to consolidate data across systems is what separates operational tools from operational systems.
What Made the Difference
Tyson had seen Viability evolve from its first iteration in 2017 through multiple versions. He’d watched the team add features like leave approval requests, employment onboarding, and mobile time-tracking—all because they actually listened to what the market needed.
That responsiveness matters. When integration opportunities emerged—Xero integration, POS integrations—the Viability team built them. When Tyson spotted a bug or issue, he didn’t have to wait weeks. Support was responsive, and issues were resolved quickly.
The onboarding was straightforward. The team set things up, staff could self-serve, and Tyson wasn’t the bottleneck.
From One Owner to Another
“I’d say like it’s your business backbone. May sound dramatic but you can’t describe it so briefly because it is so diverse, but that’s what it is.”
— Tyson Crosby, Kicco
For Tyson, Viability isn’t just a rostering tool or a payroll preparation system. It’s the connective tissue that holds the entire operation together. It’s the single source of truth that lets him forecast what he’s earning, know what he can afford to spend, and keep his team accountable to those numbers every single week.
Ready to see what becomes possible when everything connects?
We can walk you through how it works—no pressure, just a quick chat about your venues and what integration could mean for your operation.