The Challenge: Lease Data Running Across Three Silos

When Priscilla Santana joined Fresh Dining Concepts five years ago, the company had 50 stores. By the time she was named Assistant Controller and handed responsibility for the leasing department, that number had grown to 360+.

The core problem wasn’t a lack of effort. It was a lack of connection. Fresh Dining Concepts runs three distinct teams: a development team that negotiates and signs leases, a leasing team that manages amendments and critical dates, and an accounting team responsible for ASC 842, rent payments, and financial reporting. Without a central system, these teams operated in silos. Lease documents lived in scattered shared drives. Critical dates were tracked manually. And when the accounting team needed information from the development team, it meant chasing people down.

The bigger the portfolio grew, the wider the gaps became.

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Connectivity: One System That Connects Every Team

Today, Occupier is the connective tissue across every stage of the lease lifecycle at Fresh Dining Concepts. The Chief Development Officer drops new leases into a shared drive using a standardized template. The Occupier team abstracts them. And the data flows directly into the financials — no manual re-entry, no chasing.

“Occupier is really our source of truth. It’s our connection point. I don’t have to chase anyone down asking where a lease is. We all know. That’s where we meet.” — Priscilla Santana, Assistant Controller, Fresh Dining Concepts

Before, lease documents lived on a shared drive — if someone remembered to upload them. Important amendments were hard to track down. Auditors couldn’t self-serve. Now, Grant Thornton, their external auditors, have direct access to Occupier. They go in, find the leases and amendments themselves, and come back only with specific questions. What used to be a scavenger hunt now closes in under 10 minutes.

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Acquisitions: 30 New Leases, Zero Disruption

For a fast-growing restaurant group, acquisitions are a regular event — and historically, a stressful one. A large batch of new leases meant manual data entry, verification work, and the risk of errors slipping through.

Their most recent 30-lease acquisition told a different story entirely.

“This was the smoothest acquisition we’ve ever had. I implemented a new review on my end to compare the base rent the landlords are sending us versus what’s in Occupier — and I don’t think any of them have been wrong yet.”

The difference was process. The Occupier team worked alongside Fresh Dining Concepts to build a clean intake workflow, and this time, every lease came in verified. No surprises. No cleanup backlog.

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Audit Season: From Fire Drill to Non-Event

For Fresh Dining Concepts’ accounting team, audit season used to mean fielding a steady stream of requests from external auditors who had no way to access lease data on their own. Every question required someone on the team to stop, locate the right document, and respond.

Now, Grant Thornton logs into Occupier directly. Lease documents, amendments, and financial schedules are all there. If an auditor asks why base rent jumped from one period to the next, the answer is a click away — the amendment is right there in the system.

“Why did your base rent jump from this to that?” Priscilla explained. “The amendment’s in there. They go in and find it on their own — which saves us so much time.”

What once took an afternoon to chase down now takes less than 10 minutes.

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Scale: 7x Growth, One Additional Hire

The most striking number in Fresh Dining Concepts’ story isn’t their location count. It’s the headcount behind it.

When Priscilla joined, one person managed 50 stores alongside other finance functions. Today, with 360+ locations and lease data flowing across three teams, Fresh Dining Concepts has added just one additional dedicated hire on the leasing side. That’s 7x portfolio growth — without 7x operational overhead.

Budget season illustrates the point. Before Occupier, building the annual budget meant manually opening every single lease to find upcoming rent escalations — across hundreds of locations, one by one. It was time-consuming, error-prone, and impossible to scale. Fresh Dining Concepts’ entire 2026 budget was built from a single Occupier export: every location, every escalation, every year through the end of each lease, in one pull.

“We would have had to add a person roughly every 50 stores without Occupier. Instead, we’ve scaled to 361 locations with just one additional hire. That kind of growth wouldn’t have been possible otherwise — the system absorbed the complexity that would have otherwise required more people.”

As Fresh Dining Concepts continues to grow — and as their portfolio complexity grows with it — Occupier scales alongside them. The system that handled 50 stores handles 361 just as cleanly, and it’ll handle whatever comes next.

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