Deductly – I'm a restaurant owner with 15 years in tech. this saved me

Hey HN,

I'm a tech founder — 15 years building software, fintech background, been through the early startup grind before. I thought I knew how to run a business.

Then I opened a restaurant. And I got humbled fast.

Nothing in my background prepared me for how financially opaque restaurant operations actually are. Sales looked fine. Cash kept disappearing. By the time my P&L landed, the damage from a bad food cost week had already compounded twice. I was running a margin business in the dark.

So I did what I always do: I went deep. Down to the penny. I connected every data source I had — Toast POS, payroll, bank feeds, SYSCO invoices — and started building the financial visibility I needed to actually understand what was happening inside my own restaurant in real time.

That became Deductly.

It normalizes all of those data streams into a live P&L structured the way operators think — prime cost, food cost variance, labor percentage — updating continuously, not at month-end. When something goes sideways, you see it before it shows up on a report.

The hardest technical piece was reconciling ACH settlement timing and VISA batch deposits against POS daily revenue without creating phantom gaps in the P&L. Took a few painful iterations to get right across bank formats.

I'm building this for every independent operator who is smart, working incredibly hard, and still flying blind financially because the tools weren't built for them. The AI insights go deep as letting you know if your marketing spend increase is working or not.

Would genuinely love feedback — especially from anyone who has run a restaurant, worked in restaurant fintech, or built data pipelines across fragmented financial sources.

→ getdeductly.com