Star Group

Star Group was formed in April 2023 from the merger of two of New Zealand's most prominent hospitality operators: Kāpura (formerly Wellington Hospitality Group) and Joylab (formerly Barworks). Kāpura brought 35+ venues across Wellington, Waikato, and the Bay of Plenty; Joylab brought 20+ bars and restaurants across Auckland. Together, backed by DB Breweries and Heineken, they created one of New Zealand's largest hospitality groups — operating 60+ bars, pubs, and restaurants under iconic brands including Goode Brothers, Rosie's Red-Hot Cantina, Master Kong, Foxglove, The Gipsy Moth, and many more.

With head offices spanning Auckland and Wellington, Star Group operates at genuine scale across Aotearoa.

The merger that created Star Group in April 2023 brought an immediate data challenge: two businesses, two sets of venues, and two entirely different POS platforms. Kāpura's 35+ venues were each running OneTap as their point-of-sale system — individual site-by-site installations with no centralised data. Joylab's 20+ Auckland venues operated from a single SWIFTPOS server. There was no common data infrastructure, no shared reporting, and no single source of truth across the newly combined group.

As the merged group began trading as Star Group, the leadership team needed to see the whole business — not two separate organisations. Operational managers, regional managers, and the finance team each needed visibility into real-time sales, gross profit, and wage costs across all venues, regardless of which legacy business they had come from. Pulling that together manually across two incompatible systems was time-consuming and prone to inconsistency.

Mark Williams, who led the project from Star Group's side, articulated the need clearly: the business required a platform that could unify data from all sites in real time — across two different POS systems, rostering, and financial data — and present it in a way that non-technical users could act on from any device.

Key challenges included:

• No centralised view of sales, GP, or wages across 60+ venues from two legacy businesses
• Two incompatible POS platforms: Kāpura sites each on individual OneTap installations; Joylab sites on a single SWIFTPOS server
• Wage cost data in Deputy was not connected to sales data for real-time labour efficiency reporting
• Head office, regional managers, and venue managers each needed different levels of access and visibility
• Historic sales data needed to be loaded separately for each individual OneTap site (Kāpura) and from the single SWIFTPOS server (Joylab)

Star Group engaged 2IQ in mid-2023 — shortly after the Kāpura–Joylab merger closed — signing the Terms of Engagement in September 2023 for the Centralised Reporting Project. The scope focused on delivering a single Group Operational Reporting solution across all venues from both legacy businesses, with a path to Group Financial Reporting in subsequent phases.

MyIQ was selected because its cloud-based platform was already purpose-configured for multi-site hospitality operators — and critically, it had pre-built, plug-and-play gateway connectors for all three POS systems involved: OneTap (used across Kāpura's individual sites), SWIFTPOS (Joylab's server), and Tevalis (the group's target platform going forward). Data from all sources could flow directly into MyIQ's pre-existing Azure SQL data warehouse from day one. Star Group's branded MyIQ web application — accessible on any PC or mobile device — required no custom development; it was a matter of configuration, not construction.

Equally important was the way 2IQ approached the engagement: a collaborative, phased rollout, configuring and tailoring the platform to Star Group's specific operational structure rather than applying a one-size-fits-all deployment.

The first phase focused on configuring the core operational reporting suite. Given the two-business heritage of Star Group, this required a tailored approach to the historic data loads: each Kāpura site's individual OneTap installation was connected and loaded separately, while Joylab's venues were brought in via a single SWIFTPOS server load. All transaction data flowed automatically into MyIQ's pre-existing Azure SQL data warehouse, using its Kimball-standard dimensional model to normalise data from both legacy systems into a single consistent structure across all venues.

A Master Product Catalogue was configured to align existing product categories from the legacy POS with Star Group's newly defined catalogue, ensuring consistent reporting as the POS transition progressed. All 70 venues were connected, with data flowing in near real-time.

The reporting suite — delivered via a branded Star Group MyIQ web application drawing on MyIQ's pre-built Power BI report library — included Sales dashboards (Daily, Weekly, Weekly Summary), Gross Profit Analysis including Food vs Beverage GP breakdown, Discounts, Payments, and Sales Analysis reports, and Projection / Target vs Actual reporting.

Deputy Integration — Wage Cost Reporting

In March 2024, MyIQ's pre-built Deputy connector was activated, bringing Star Group's rostering and wage data directly into the MyIQ data warehouse alongside sales. This unlocked live wage cost reporting — giving operational managers the ability to view labour hours, wage dollars, and wage cost as a percentage of sales, all within a single dashboard.

This was a significant capability for Star Group, whose managers wanted to monitor labour efficiency at the hour level — understanding where efficiency gains could be found at the start and end of shifts, and how wage costs tracked relative to sales by venue and region.

User Access & Role Configuration

The MyIQ platform was configured to support three user tiers — Site Managers (single venue access), Regional Managers (multi-venue access), and Admins (full group access) — with the ability for head office to manage user accounts and site assignments directly. Sites were configured with region attributes, enabling regional dashboards and comparative reporting across venue cohorts.