Behind the Scenes
Coffee professionals love to focus on the thing we work so hard to find, source, roast, grind, extract, and serve. That’s the part with aroma and applause. But behind every cappuccino is a whole other world: the back office.
In France, the love of bureaucracy is happy to make this world even more excruciating than it might be elsewhere. Forms for forms. Numbers for numbers. Stamps for stamps. Meanwhile, tech startups over here keep releasing clever ways to streamline everything, from health insurance to transport passes to taxes. It’s progress, yes, but the behind-the-curtains part of a business still takes as much planning and preparation as the fun stuff on the bar.
Much like a clean bar workflow, the back office needs one too. The dream: an incoming sale automatically falls into a system that tracks product analytics, finances, and coffee stock, and then funnels itself into the categorized, line-itemed platform that makes tax prep inexpensive and painless. One motion, many good outcomes.
I didn’t believe that dream until I watched France evolve in real time. The year was 2018. I spent an hour navigating to the Paris immigration office to file and pay a visa fee. After another hour in the lobby, my number flashed. I stepped up to a desk where an older woman looked prepared to discover in what way I might annoy her. I explained my errand. She told me I didn’t need to be there and should go home. When I asked why, she said they no longer did that there. The nearby security guard switched to English: did I understand? I said I did, but that it didn’t make sense as I’d been told to come down. “It’s all done online now,” she said. “Where?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “No one knows. Go home and you’ll get an email next week.”
I walked out certain I’d never receive that email and would eventually end up in French prison over a neglected fee.
A week later, the email arrived. I clicked a link to a very 1980’s-looking website, checked a few boxes, paid, and, blink, it was done. I realized I had just lived through a technological evolution in France, announced to no one, posted nowhere, and yet real.
Over the past seven years, that quiet evolution has touched nearly everything here—transport passes, doctor visits, and, crucially, business management. It gets better every year. It also keeps moving the target.
Because when systems and processes are constantly changing around you, keeping up is its own full-time job. I often feel like I’m forever working on the beta version of something: it sort of works, but each improvement spawns a fresh tangle of edge cases. New portals. New formats. New rules. New “this should be simple.”
So this is high on our priority list for our project, but I won’t pretend I’ve found the answer. The perfect recipe—point-of-sale X combined with analytics tracker Y, fed into French tax mystery-unlocker Z—still eludes us. For now, we keep funneling spreadsheets through a zillion platforms, reconciling what each one thinks a number should mean.
And yet: I remain hopeful. If the immigration office can evaporate a waiting room overnight and replace it with a crusty website that actually works, then one day the back office might click into place too. Maybe tomorrow we’ll get an email with a link that says, “Pay, file, reconcile. Done.”
Until then, we’ll do what we do behind the bar: keep the workflow tight, adjust the grind, and pull the next shot—both in the cup and behind the scenes.
Artwork : Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch, Photo taken by Benjamin Schwartz