Ceterus Software, a Charleston-area company that keeps the books for franchise owners, has launched a product aimed at the brands that sell those franchises.
Ceterus Insights Pro collects and standardizes financial data from franchise locations and adds benchmarking, dashboards, AI-powered insights and executive reports, the company said in a Sept. 28 announcement.
Franchisors usually see each location’s sales but often not costs such as labor and facilities, which makes it hard to tell why some locations outperform others, Ceterus said. Differences in how franchisees keep their books make the numbers hard to compare.
“Franchisors have always wanted a clearer picture of financial performance across their systems, but getting consistent data from every location has been the challenge,” CEO Bill Jones said in the announcement.
A feature called Direct Connect pulls a franchisee’s raw transaction data after a one-time setup of about five minutes, so the franchisor does not have to rely on each location’s bookkeeper, the company said. The announcement did not give pricing or name any franchise brands using the product.
Ceterus says it produces more than 90,000 franchise financial reports a year through its bookkeeping and reporting services.
The Post and Courier described Ceterus in 2020 as among the best-funded startups in the region’s technology industry. The newspaper reported in 2018 that Ceterus, then led by founder Levi Morehouse, had raised a $10 million round and had hired just over 130 employees. In 2020, the newspaper reported a $9.1 million round that brought its total investment to more than $30 million, when the company was based on Meeting Street on Charleston’s upper peninsula.
Ceterus’s website now lists Jones as chief executive and a North Charleston mailing address.
