Unit Financials

There are sophisticated BI (business intelligence) vendors who cater to franchise systems. In real time they collect, integrate, analyze, and present business information, especially financial information that includes Profit and Loss. These systems are especially suited for chains in disperse geographic areas. Many franchise networks have found that they can use BI output to gauge various performance bands for small single stores to large multi-units. Store owners can benchmark their financial performance online.

But that is a level of franchise system sophistication that only some networks use - typically the larger ones. That is probably because historically such systems have been expensive and rather fixed. But the costs for such systems, which are considerably more flexible, are very affordable nowadays, even for small franchise networks.