Papa Johns Scales Finance Transformation with Alteryx One and Google Cloud

Papa Johns has always understood the power of taking the lead on innovation.

The pizza franchise was the first to offer system-wide online ordering back in 2001. Now, with more than 6,000 stores operating across dozens of countries, the company has been equally ambitious about building a best-in-class data and analytics foundation, investing in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), BigQuery, and AI capabilities to keep pace with the speed and complexity of its global operations.

With a strong data infrastructure, some teams were working with mature analytics assets. But the finance function carried a heavy operational burden and needed a better way to manage complex, end-to-end business processes without relying on data engineers for every workflow.

A high-stakes process hidden in manual work

Papa Johns’ finance operations sit at the center of a complex, global restaurant business. The team handles risk-sensitive processes tied to franchise billing, royalty calculations, aggregator commissions, SOX compliance, and period close.

While Papa Johns had invested heavily in Google Cloud and BigQuery, assets were still difficult for the finance team to access and operationalize in the processes they ran every month.

Instead, the team was dealing with a patchwork of systems, spreadsheets, and dashboards, manually piecing together information from multiple sources during the most time-pressured period of every financial close. The consequence was a recurring drain on the finance team’s capacity and a window of risk.

SOX compliance obligations added another layer of complexity. SOX-related processes were often captured in tools like Visio or Excel, separate from the actual process logic. When workflows changed, documentation could fall behind.

Michael Wyant, VP of Enterprise Data and Corporate Solutions at Papa Johns, saw the opportunity to close that gap and optimize the value of their GCP investment and Gemini capabilities using Alteryx One.

“We saw Alteryx as a way to give our functional users access to the rich assets we’ve built within that ecosystem, as well as our financial systems,” said Wyant.

Making finance logic visible and governed with end-to-end workflows

Wyant knew the opportunity was bigger than automating a few key processes. Finance needed a way to own business logic, trust the calculations, explain exceptions, and create a scalable pattern for future AI use. “That’s critical when you start thinking about AI,” said Wyant. “If you’re trying to build AI on a single task in isolation, it’s missing all the context around the process that makes AI powerful.”

Wyant’s team started with franchise billing and reconciliation, a complex use case, but a fitting challenge that could prove a high degree of consistency and accuracy.

The team had already standardized how financial data was ingested and built structured datasets aligned to the finance calendar in BigQuery. To build the workflow, data flows from multiple point-of-sale systems, and aggregator platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats, into BigQuery, and is then enriched with store data.

No data moves outside of the governed environment. Alteryx’s Live Query for BigQuery allows every calculation to execute where the data lives, preserving security and compliance.

“Alteryx fits perfectly into that model because the workflows make the logic visible,” Wyant said. “We can learn from it, improve it, and keep it current.”

With Alteryx, complex calculations are visible, repeatable, and auditable. Finance users can ask natural language questions, such as comparing month-over-month figures, and receive immediate answers while also seeing how logic is applied. IT can support governance without becoming a bottleneck.

The partnership was central to the implementation. Wyant’s team, responsible for governance and data pipelines, worked closely with the SVP of Finance, who owns the business logic and can adapt as requirements change.

From hundreds of hours to on-demand answers  

Alteryx enabled Papa Johns to eliminate the manual effort behind franchise billing and reconciliation while creating a stronger foundation for governed finance automation. The most immediate and tangible result was reducing manual finance work by up to 400 hours per year.

The Gemini integration has further expanded what’s possible. Questions that once required tracking down the right person can now be answered in seconds. And SOX compliance controls are embedded directly into the workflow, automatically documented and always current.

Scaling enterprise-wide process intelligence

From the outset, Wyant and his team built the billing and reconciliation workflow as a template to use across the finance function and beyond.

The company has identified additional opportunities across the Papa Cards gift card program, franchisee reimbursement processes, international sales, tax, and accounts payable. “Our finance team definitely responds to savings and ROI, so that’s been positive,” Wyant said. “We’re hoping to build on the momentum and excitement, and that’s already starting to happen.”

Looking further ahead, Wyant sees Alteryx as a foundational layer for AI adoption at scale. The integration with Model Context Protocol (MCP), which both Alteryx and Google Cloud support, positions Papa Johns to extend its governed datasets into agentic workflows, allowing AI systems to act on trusted data with the right context, security, and permissions already built in.

The vision is clear: wherever there is routine work consuming strategic capacity, Alteryx gives Papa Johns the ability to free up those hours and redirect them toward the work that moves the business forward.