Costa Taco eliminates 46 hours of manual reporting with HYPHN Automation
Costa Taco uses a custom restaurant dashboard to bring sales, people and operations data from nine systems into one real-time view.
Industry: Hospitality
Service: Business intelligence dashboard and automation
Location: Queensland and Northern NSW
Know the numbers. Back the team. Keep growing.
Costa Taco began as a market stall in Currumbin in 2020. Today, brothers Nick and Matt Stanley run bustling venues in Broadbeach, Burleigh and Byron Bay, day after day.
Becoming one of the coast’s most iconic brands doesn't happen on flavour alone. Yes, the Quesabirria is that good. But behind the full tables is a business built on two things: knowing its numbers and backing its people.
Costa Taco knows its numbers inside and out. Every venue works to clear benchmarks and targets across sales, COGS, wages, service times and guest reviews, and the leadership team lives by them. Nobody is guessing how a venue is tracking.
“We’ve always been obsessed with data. We knew our numbers and we had a great understanding of what success looks like in every area of the business. The challenge we faced was gathering that data from each platform and organising it into a spreadsheet. By the time we had the full picture, the week had moved on.”
Their people get the same rigour. Costa Taco tracks the whole team journey, from how quickly roles are filled and how new starters are onboarded, through to training, internal promotion, engagement and retention. Staff aren't just a line on the wage report. They're a part of the business Costa Taco actively invests in and measures.
With that as the backbone, this project was never about fixing their reporting. It was about keeping what already worked, giving their team hours back from manual reporting, and turning the numbers into insights they could act on to keep every part of the business growing.
As Costa Taco grew, so did the set of platforms behind it. Sales sat in Square and Me&U, wages in Deputy, COGS in Restoke and dedicated platforms for compliance, people and customer reviews. Each tool was right for the business, and connecting them to tell the full story was the natural next step.
Why Costa Taco chose HYPHN
As a company with people and metrics top of mind, they needed more than an off the shelf solution. Costa Taco needed a way to leverage their existing KPI framework, reporting language and branding to have a solution that felt like an extension of their business, not a new system.
HYPHN, a Gold Coast automation agency, gathered requirements upfront, built the dashboard in Costa Taco's own branding, then refined it with the team during testing.
“HYPHN did an incredible job making the dashboard feel like ours. Everything about it is Costa Taco, the branding is ours, the metrics are ours, the workflow is ours. We finally have a system that fits us, rather than having to bend our business to suit other platforms.”
How the dashboard brings every system into one view
HYPHN built a cloud hosted platform that pulls data automatically from every system, mostly through direct API connections. Where no API existed, as with Square KDS, we built a custom automation instead.
It all feeds one central database powering three scorecards:
Financial: Sales, spend per head, prime cost split into COGS and wages, overheads and net operating profit, plus a monthly scoreboard of forecast against actual, by location
People: Every new starter tracked from first shift to fully onboarded, employee engagement measured by eNPS, and exits recorded with the reasons behind them
Operations: Service time, customer reviews, compliance, sales per labour hour and monthly targets
Selected metrics can go out by automated email, and managers can add commentary directly against the numbers, so context travels with the data instead of getting lost in an email thread. Permissions are set by module and location, so a venue manager sees their site while head office sees the group.
What the Costa Taco team is seeing
Reporting now runs on auto-pilot. The previous time spent on compiling numbers each week now goes into real-time business decisions. Across Costa Taco, that's 46 hours a week back to leadership to focus on their core functions.*
“We’ve got 46 hours a week back, but the real change is what we do with them. We’re not building the report anymore, we’re acting on it. If service times slip at one venue or wages creep above target, we see it that day and we fix it that day.”
What's ahead for Costa Taco
Costa Taco is growing fast, with their fourth venue on the Sunshine Coast opening in November. With the foundation HYPHN built, that venue will open with accurate and timely reporting from day one.
"Our venue leaders can focus on constant improvement and driving performance, rather than chasing and reporting numbers," said Vaoa. "That means better outcomes for Costa Taco, our community and the guest experience."
"Next, we're accelerating our forecasting and planning. We want data driven forecasts that go beyond sales and flow into every part of the business: prep and ordering lists, forecasted labour needs for rostering, triggers for hiring, loyalty and repeat visits. The plan is for the dashboard to know Costa Taco inside and out, and to provide focus for our leaders to truly drive what matters: lead high performing teams and give our guests an incredible experience."
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*Based on time previously spent collecting, consolidating and preparing reporting across three venues and three teams.
