How Poké House more than doubles in scale with Intuit Enterprise Suite

Poké chain scales without a legacy ERP

Poké House’s mission is sharing California’s spirit through their unique take on traditional Hawaiian Poké. Since 2016, the business has grown from a single shop to being on track to open 50 locations and roughly 500 employees across a mixed corporate and franchise network. Before Intuit Enterprise Suite, the finance team ran on an outsourced Sage setup so opaque that Controller Scott Essex couldn’t log in to his own books. Today, he builds a new franchisee's chart of accounts in five minutes instead of three hours, and closes the loop on financials the team couldn’t previously see.

Outsourced books and lack of visibility

For a year, Poké House ran its accounting through an outsourced service built on a Sage backend, reachable only through the provider's proprietary middleware. The result was “a controller without control,” as Essex puts it. The team had no Sage login and no access to the tools behind it, leaving them only able to pull a profit and loss statement and download the general ledger and little else. The interface was coded in a way that made “a single report take minutes to generate,” says Essex. “Going from our old system to Intuit Enterprise Suite was like going from a rotary phone to a smartphone.”

The cost of that lack of visibility compounded as the business grew. Onboarding new stores into the outsourced system took months of setup and background integration, throttling a company rapidly signing dozens of new units. The books ran three to four months behind, which turned routine diligence into scrambles. When 2025 financials were due to auditors, Essex spent roughly two weeks manually working through a spreadsheet of open balance-sheet items to force a close. However, because no one internally owned the data, errors went uncaught. After taking the books in house, Essex found sales tax being charged on items bought for resale, utility payments still running on a warehouse the company no longer occupied, and monthly fees for a point-of-sale system no longer in use.

QuickBooks ease and familiarity beats NetSuite complexity

With VCs signaling that serious investors expect robust accounting platforms such as NetSuite or QuickBooks, Poké House evaluated its options against the demands of a fast growing, multi-unit operator. According to CEO and Founder James Deng, “NetSuite would’ve been a minimum $300,000 and up to 24 months of effective downtime, not to mention outsourced engineering and heavy configuration.” For Deng, the most important factor for Poké House was “needing to stay nimble,” and traditional ERPs actively worked against this goal. Restaurant 365 and other solutions were also evaluated, with the team spending a total of $30,000 testing and trialing before finding Intuit Enterprise Suite.

Intuit’s AI-native ERP won on several fronts: Ease of use was priority, as on-site managers in a fast-turnover business need intuitive tools and fast training. The company's in-house AI team also pointed to Intuit's open API as the “best available in the game,” and called it the deciding factor. Existing integrations with Toast and the Choco ordering platform meant the team did not have to rip out its current stack. A financial analysis on bringing 25 entities in-house confirmed the team’s math, and where peers described NetSuite timelines measured in years, Intuit Enterprise Suite was live in days.

Putting control back in-house

The clearest change is ownership of the data. Essex can now open a report, click any figure, and drill into the transactions, tracing a number to its source in seconds. This capability didn’t exist on the old system, and it converts month-end from “an act of faith” into an act of inspection. The team can now see any loss in its warehouse, giving Deng the accurate cost and inventory picture he needs to adjust pricing rather than guess at it.

Onboarding franchise entities, once a roadblock, is now routine. Essex spins up a new franchisee's books in about five minutes rather than the two to three hours of manual entry it used to take, cutting initial Chart of Accounts setup time by 95%. Migrating customers and vendors from the company's old QuickBooks instance took one to two hours through Spreadsheet Sync, a job Essex expected to be far longer.

Day to day, the team routes every vendor invoice to a central inbox, where Intuit's bill-capture AI reads the document, populates the vendor and bill details, and attaches the invoice for easy review. Deng credits the combination of Intuit Enterprise Suite and his AI team with saving significant labor hours and letting the finance function absorb growth without adding headcount. Running the whole network from a single consolidated view, Deng can now keep a pulse on the cost of goods and labor at every unit, which matters most for first-time franchise owners who need that oversight to survive.

Turning franchise visibility into franchisee value

As Poké House doubles toward 50 locations, with dozens more units already signed, Essex wants to give franchisees transparent financials and immediate feedback on their unit economics, turning the corporate finance team into a source of guidance rather than a “black box that other franchise companies experience.” With Intuit Enterprise Suite, the goal is a network where every operator can see what corporate sees, and run a healthier business because of it.

Read more about how Intuit Enterprise Suite helps businesses like Poké House rapidly scale without the pain or cost of a traditional ERP.

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