Hospitality bought the software.Nobody delivered the work.
Peregrine Partners runs the after-close admin for Melbourne venues. This page carries the argument behind it: where the hours actually go, why nine good products still leave you working at eleven at night, and what we do about it.
9
Departments, running overnight
06:04
The brief lands before you open
0
New logins for your staff to learn
A venue runs nine systems, nine logins and nine bills, and not one of them knows what the other eight did last night.
Ask an owner what they use and you will hear a list. A till, an accounting package, a rostering app, a booking system somebody sold them, a supplier portal per supplier, a Google listing, two social accounts and a bank feed. Every one of them is a good product. Together they are a full-time job nobody is paid to do, and it gets done at eleven at night by the person who can least afford the hour.
8–12 hrs
a week on finance admin alone, before an owner gets any help.
3–9%
net margin at the average Australian full-service venue. Cafes sit at 4 to 6%.
35–42%
of revenue now goes to labour, up from 30 to 33% five years ago.
The software is the small half of the bill.
Add up what a venue spends on the subscriptions and it is rarely the number that hurts. The number that hurts is what sits behind them: the bookkeeper, the agency and the ad spend on top of the agency, the hours an owner works after close because no product does the job end to end. Across the economy the ratio runs about six to one against software, and hospitality is worse than average because the margins are thinner and the compliance is heavier.
“Every one of those nine products expects somebody in your building to drive it. That somebody is you, at eleven at night.”
Peregrine is priced against the second row, because that is the row it takes over. The subscriptions stay where they are.
Seats and licences. The tool you still have to drive.
The bookkeeper, the agency, the agency's ad spend, and the hours you do yourself after close.
The rule-following half got solved. The deciding half did not.
- // 01
Machines got good at the rules
Reconciling 148 transactions, checking a delivery against an invoice, drafting a roster against award rates and a forecast. That work follows rules, it can be checked line by line, and software can now do it end to end without a person watching each step.
- // 02
The calls stayed yours
Whether to wear a 34% jump on tomatoes or take the dish off the menu. Whether to give the Saturday shift to the person who needs the money or the person who is better on a full room. No system holds your reasons, and we have not built one that pretends to.
- // 03
So we built the seam
Peregrine does the first half and hands you the second, in a form that takes seconds rather than an evening. Anthropic's guidance for agent builders is to expand autonomy only in proportion to demonstrated reliability. Ours starts at none. Every department drafts, stops and waits, and the queue is short on purpose.
The one part we refuse to integrate.
The same objection comes up in every first meeting, and it is never about features. Owners resent bolting a third-party booking system onto the business. Another login, another subscription, another system that half fits and talks to nothing. So ours is part of Peregrine instead, built around your venue, with nothing extra for your staff to learn. Every other department works through something you already pay for. That single difference is why a head spa seating one guest per room and an arts school counting terms can both run on the same platform, when neither of them fits a per-cover product at all.
Four rules we hold to, whether or not anyone is checking.
Nothing sends without you
Every department drafts and stops. No order, payrun, roster or post leaves the building until you have approved it, and the approval is one tap from the morning brief.
Every figure opens
Click a number and see the invoice line behind it. If a department made a call, the log says what triggered it, what it cost and who signed off. There is no figure on your brief you cannot chase to its source.
Your accounts stay yours
We hold credentials scoped to what a department needs and nothing beyond it. No data leaves your systems to train anything, and you can revoke a department on your own without ringing us.
Numbers carry their source
Every figure on this site is either a published market rate with the source next to it, or arithmetic modelled on a real venue's invoices and labelled as modelled. We would rather a thinner page than one you can catch us on.
The people who write your rules have worked a full room.
A partner runs the first session, sits through a service, and stays on the account. That is why the platform fits a brunch room, a head spa and a school on the same nine departments.
Kayden Do
Partner · Commerce, University of Melbourne
Sits with the owners, learns the floor, turns it into product.
Jason Ye
Partner · Mechanical Engineering (Hons) / Commerce, Monash
Builds the systems and keeps them honest.
Thomas Dai
Partner · Chemical Engineering, RMIT
Has taken a product to market before. Co-founded Iris, a B2B marketplace.
Melbourne, and on your floor.
The first session is a morning with your invoices, your roster and your till open in front of us. We take on new venues in small groups, because a partner sits on every floor we bring on and that is the part that makes it work.