What is Aziell? A Prescriptive FP&A Platform for Multi-Location Operators

Ask ten multi-location operators what their FP&A stack looks like and nine of them describe the same thing: QuickBooks on one side, a tangled Excel model on the other, and a bookkeeper trying to keep them reconciled by the fifteenth of every month. The model tells them what happened. It does not tell them what to do next.

Aziell was built to close that gap. It is a prescriptive financial planning and analysis platform for operators running four to fifty locations — restaurant groups, dental DSOs, HVAC roll-ups, childcare academies, fitness studios, and the funds that back them. Instead of presenting you with a dashboard and wishing you luck, Aziell ingests your general ledger, benchmarks every branch against its peers, and surfaces the specific debt, pricing, lease, and headcount moves that are worth money — quantified three ways: annual dollars saved, monthly cash freed, and enterprise-value uplift at your exit multiple.

The short definition

Aziell is a prescriptive FP&A platform. It sits between your books and your board pack. It replaces the stack of spreadsheets, Google Sheets tabs, and quarterly fractional-CFO work that most operators in the 4-to-50-location band depend on today. If your business is too big for a bookkeeper alone and too small for a full-time CFO with an Anaplan license, Aziell is built for you.

Three things that separate prescriptive FP&A from descriptive FP&A

1. It recommends, not just reports

A descriptive tool tells you that your food-cost percentage is 34% and colors the cell red if it exceeds a threshold. A prescriptive tool tells you that shifting your beverage mix and renegotiating two of your supplier contracts would drop that to 30.2%, freeing $18,400 of monthly cash and adding roughly $1.1M of enterprise value at a 5.0× EBITDA multiple. It then shows you the math.

Every recommendation in Aziell is priced in dollars, not percentages. Percentages are for accountants. Dollars are for owners.

2. It benchmarks branch-to-branch, not just company-to-last-year

The most valuable FP&A exercise a multi-location operator can run is ranking their own branches against one another. Your top-quartile branch is the benchmark your bottom-quartile branch should be measured against — not last year, not an industry report, not a consultant’s median. Aziell turns every operational metric — revenue per labor hour, lease coverage, member churn, rework rate — into an internal leaderboard. See our deep dive on branch-level P&L benchmarking for why this matters.

3. It translates every decision into exit multiples

Most SMB operators eventually sell, recapitalize, or take debt. All three transactions price on EBITDA multiples. That means every operational move — raising prices 3%, cutting two underutilized shifts, refinancing a variable-rate note — has two values: the cash value today and the enterprise-value value at exit.

A $50,000 annual EBITDA gain is worth $50,000 this year. At a 5.5× multiple, it is worth $275,000 the day you sell. Aziell shows both numbers on every recommendation, because one of them is almost always larger.

Who Aziell is built for

Aziell is not a generic planning tool. It is designed for five specific audiences who share the same pain:

• Multi-unit restaurant groups that want branch-level P&Ls with food cost, labor, and prime cost normalized the same way every week.
• Dental and medical DSOs rolling up practices and needing clean per-location gross margin by service line.
• HVAC and trades roll-ups comparing gross profit per technician across acquired platforms.
• Childcare academies and fitness studios where membership cohort math dominates revenue forecasting.
• Emerging and mid-market funds who need a portco dashboard that speaks the same language across every holdco.

What Aziell actually does — a tour

The platform is organized around three surfaces that mirror how operators actually work through the finance calendar.

Plan

Driver-based budgets with branches as first-class citizens. A plan is not a monolithic spreadsheet; it is a tree of drivers (visits per chair, tickets per truck, members per studio) that roll up into a consolidated P&L. You build the plan once and fork it into branches that inherit assumptions but override anything local. Read our driver-based budgeting framework for the setup playbook.

Actuals

A direct QuickBooks Online connection pulls actuals by class, location, and account. No CSV exports. No stale data. The QuickBooks integration guide walks through setup. Gusto pulls your payroll the same way, so labor productivity is always live.

Decide — the CFO Copilot

This is the prescriptive layer. The Copilot continuously scans your financials and flags the highest-dollar opportunities: debt that can be refinanced, pricing that is below peer median, leases with expiring TI allowances, overstaffed branches. Each recommendation is a card with the math inline — no black box. Our Debt Optimizer deep dive walks through one example end-to-end.

What Aziell is not

Three things it is not, because positioning by negation is as honest as positioning by definition:

• It is not a bookkeeping replacement. You still need QuickBooks, Xero, or an equivalent general ledger. Aziell reads from your books; it does not keep them.
• It is not a consolidation tool for the Fortune 500. If your group has thirty legal entities across eleven currencies with intercompany eliminations, Aziell is not the right fit. It optimizes for the 4-to-50-location band where complexity is operational, not structural.
• It is not a generative-AI wrapper. The recommendations are rule-based and explainable. Every number on every card traces back to a line in your general ledger. You can show an auditor the lineage.

Why prescriptive, why now

The tooling that built the mid-market CFO — Excel, a descriptive BI dashboard, a quarterly consulting engagement — was designed for a world where data took two weeks to land and a fractional CFO was the only person who could interpret it. That world is gone. Your general ledger is live. Your payroll is live. Your point-of-sale is live. The bottleneck is no longer data; it is judgment. Aziell systematizes the judgment piece, so a good operator with a bookkeeper and Aziell can cover the ground that used to require a $300k full-time CFO plus a $75k tool stack.

That is the single sentence behind the product: grow enterprise value without growing the finance team.

Where to go next

If you want to see the platform in motion, the live 8-branch demo takes about five minutes. If you want to understand the philosophy, start with the hidden cost of spreadsheet budgeting and then the SMB operator’s guide to enterprise value. Both are intentionally vendor-agnostic; both will make the rest of this blog easier to read.