About Opt XL Solutions Inc.

Philip Leroux is the founder of Opt XL Solutions Inc. and the creator of the apps currently available. They have been developed with the benefit of 35 years of experience in the hospitality industry along with 15 years in financial services and software development.

Phil’s career in the hospitality industry began in 1973 with a part-time job as a busboy at The Montreal Board of Trade. Over the course of a career spanning six decades, Phil has served as a busboy, waiter, bartender, manager, and proprietor in a wide variety of food & beverage operations including fine dining with tableside service, casual dining, both independent and franchise, banquets, hotel and golf course, as well as a variety of lounge and nightclub operations.

In 1987, after 14 years in hospitality, Phil embarked on a new career in the insurance industry. Phil's new career coincided with the introduction of Microsoft Excel. With his new business partner, he took advantage of the release of Excel and created a financial planning application to enhance the services they were offering to their clients. Although the app was not developed for commercial purposes, interest from colleagues led to the birth of a cottage industry. With the evolution of the program into a sophisticated financial modelling application and significant growth of the user base across Canada, the enterprise grew into a going concern requiring full-time attention and a supporting staff. Eventually, in August of 2000, the company was acquired by Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of information to the finance, tax, and accounting industries. After 2 years assisting with the transition in a consulting role, Phil returned to his roots.

Over the following 20 years, back in hospitality, Phil continued to develop spreadsheets for personal use focused mainly on inventory management. Once again, interest from colleagues would lead to the development of apps that could benefit others. In 2019, Phil began working part-time as a bartender in a busy pub. As is not uncommon, the cashout procedure at this pub was an ordeal that consumed 20 minutes to a half hour at the end of every shift. The manager was spending a considerable amount of his time assisting servers with their cashouts. Phil decided to use his skills to make this process a little easier. The app he created was installed on a computer at the back of the bar and the results were immediate and dramatic. It was like flipping a switch. Cashouts went from a 20 minute ordeal with calculation errors and legibility issues to a 2 minute, calculation-free, fill-in-the-blanks exercise, overnight.

The manager then asked if Phil might be able to help him with inventory management. With numerous personal spreadsheets already created, Phil turned his attention to combining these spreadsheets into a single user-friendly application. This app evolved over the next couple of years to become the Bar Inventory Tracker.

While these apps are powerful tools and very effective, Phil decided to make the transition from spreadsheet apps built in Excel to cloud-based apps before making them available to the industry. This redesign further improves operational efficiency making life easier for all concerned which is the ultimate goal of Opt XL Solutions.

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