Technology

Tracking, recording and paying invoices by hand is a headache that all restaurant owners, operators and bookkeepers have to deal with. 

Accounts Payable (AP) automation is a technology that addresses these inefficiencies that restaurants have turned to. 

An automated invoice processing system allows restaurant operators to spend less time with paper invoices and more time on restaurant operations. This provides a stellar experience for guests. 

Digital payments to vendors are a growing trend in the restaurant industry. To better understand the benefits of a digital payment process, we’ve added some notes below. 

INDUSTRY SHIFTS TOWARDS DIGITAL PAYMENTS 

AP departments historically recorded vendor invoices manually, cross-checked numbers by hand, entered them in system and sent payments via paper check. Like any manual process, technology has been able to streamline this process, saving time and money for operators. 

So why are AP teams and vendors turning to virtual payments? 

Simply put, virtual payments replace a scheduled paper check and eliminate manual paperwork. 

LESS COST THAN MANUAL PAYMENTS 

Paper checks may seem like standard practice but there are several hidden costs involved. Sending checks in the mail incurs the cost of postage as well as the time it takes to send a paper check and record the transaction. 

Once a payment is sent, you then need to wait for the payment to post and ensure the balance in your account will cover said payment. This process could take days or weeks to ensure the right person receives the check and claims it in a timely manner. 

Digital Payments on the other hand cost significantly less money and post immediately, leaving a digital paper trail attached to the invoice and showing exactly where the payment is being applied. 

MORE EFFICIENCY AND ACCURACY 

Digital payments can be sent and received in a matter of days. This allows restaurants to pay their vendors faster with fewer opportunities for miscommunication and errors. 

With paper invoices, each invoice must be manually entered into a system and continually checked for accuracy.  Because there are so many steps involved to ensure accuracy, you are paying for it in time and resources. 

Digital payments provide consistency. Digital payment systems check for duplicate invoices and verify amounts. You can even set payment approval rules that are automatically routed through the system. This is perfect for multi-unit operators. Your team can reference back and understand the status of each invoice and what is pending approval or in process. 

With this streamline efficiency the team is able to focus on more important tasks like running the restaurant. 

WHY VENDORS LOVE DIGITAL PAYMENTS 

Vendors are becoming more interested in virtual payments for a number of reasons. Everyone likes to be paid faster and on time. Vendors are no exception. Digital payments allow vendors to receive payments quickly and on time. No more following up with customers looking for paper checks. 

Overall, digital payments allow you to streamline your Accounts Payable Process by adding efficiencies to every step. Digital Payments allow you to pay how you want and when you want. They even provide a less costly, more reliable and safer solution to writing paper checks. 

I’m sure all your personal financing and bill pay is done electronically. Why should your restaurant be any different? 

HOW TO GET STARTED 

Schedule time with our team to learn more and get set up today! 

For whatever reason, restaurants are one of the last industries to embrace technology. Technology has easily allowed other industries to thrive, while restaurants are still in the dark ages using clipboards and pencil. 

We want to help improve the way you spend time in the back office. Automating your Accounts Payables is one of the easiest ways to streamline a historically time-consuming and manual task.  

Here are 6 reason why you should automate your Accounts Payables with us today! 

Save Time 

Automating your Accounts Payables easily cuts down the time that you used to spend manually keying in invoices and paying them. Let’s get you back in the kitchen and out from behind a computer! 

Cost Savings 

Automating your Accounts Payables saves on the time cost of a bookkeeper or accountant and streamlines your communication with them. You’ll also save on writing and mailing paper checks.  

Eliminate Manual Data Entry Errors 

Errors can easily occur when manually keying in invoices which costs you even more time when trying to fix these errors. Automating your Accounts Payables process eliminates data entry errors. Simply upload an invoice. We then digitize that invoice making sure your data is accurate and up to date. 

Schedule Payments to be Made on Time 

Time gets the best of us, and a late payment is the last thing you want. Using an automated Account payables system allows you to stay on top of invoice status’ and even schedule payments on time.  

A Digital Filing Cabinet 

Automating your Accounts Payables process allows you to easily digitize invoices and keep them in one organized space. Easily access invoices from anywhere without keeping them in a box in the back office. 

Reconcile Your Books Faster 

The faster you can reconcile your books the quicker you can find issues. Automating your Accounts Payables allows you to reconcile your books quicker without the manual data entry providing you with accurate data integrity and up to date books in real time.  

Interested in learning more and getting set up? Reach out to our team today! 

You’ve heard the term Accounts Payable a thousand times, maybe even a million. It’s probably instilled in your mind and has become second nature at this point. Or maybe it hasn’t. 

Either way, it’s okay. We’re here to give you the 411 on everything you need to know in relation to Accounts Payable. 

Accounts Payable is the money due to vendors or suppliers for goods or services received. In short, it is money that has not been paid yet. 

Accounts Payable could be anything from ingredients and disposables to your lease and licenses you need to operate your restaurant. 

For restaurant operators, this process can be laborious, frustrating, and unreliable. Accounting itself is already stressful. When you’re a fast-paced restaurant, you have invoices coming in almost every day. It’s hard to keep up with every single order you receive… and having to count and process it all too?! Forget about it. Nobody has the time for that, especially in 2022. 

KEEPING TRACK OF NUMBERS 

When running a restaurant, it’s important to keep your numbers accurate and consistent. Whether it’s your food costs, cost of goods sold, or inventory—you never want to see errors. 

Although, when you’re making multiple orders every week, you’re bound to come across vendor payment issues every so often. This ranges from delays to late fees, increased operational costs, or even strained relationships between you and your vendors. Nobody wants to experience this, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s inevitable. 

You want to make sure you’re keeping track of your payment schedule as soon as you receive an invoice. The best way to do this is to keep track of inventory in a timely, organized manner. It’s easy to misplace files when you have hundreds coming in regularly. This is where technology comes in. 

MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNTS PAYABLE WITH TECHNOLOGY 

Do you really have time to write checks, stuff envelopes, and mail them out when you have a handful of other things take care of? Time is valuable now more than ever. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one less thing to worry about? BillPay is a great solution to modernizing your Accounts Payable. 

By implementing technology into this process, you can put time back into your day and save money. When using BillPay, you can see all of your bills, choose when to schedule them out, and the status of each payment, all in one centralized location. 

This also means you can pay your bills from anywhere at any time—whether you’re away on a beach somewhere or lying in bed enjoying a glass of wine, it’s available to you at all hours, right from your fingertips. 

Online transactions are secure and safe to use, and they prevent you from any fraud. You can monitor each of your payments to see when they have arrived and been processed. No more scrambling through tracking codes from the Post Office and waiting over the phone for hours to check the status of your payment. It’s updated in real-time when done online. 

There’s no better feeling than taking control over your accounting. It’s a tedious process but making use out of technology makes it a lot easier. 

If you pay all of your personal bills online—mortgage, phone, utilities, then why not your restaurant bills too? It’s 2022, embrace technology. It’s here to help. 

HOW TO GET STARTED 

Schedule time with our team to learn more and set up your account today! 

Not only does Orderly allow our customers to manage things like recipe costs, inventory and food costs, but we also allow users to pay any of their vendors directly from our platform. This is the only software to complete the entire process from receiving an invoice to paying that invoice. 

Traditionally, restaurants pay their vendors in a few different ways. Manually writing checks, using credit cards or another third party system. This process could easily lead to confusion and a duplication of work. 

WHO MAILS CHECKS ANYMORE? 

When was the last time you paid a personal bill by check? When was the last time your employer PAID YOU with a physical check? My guess is it’s been a while. Why should paying your vendors be any different? 

The biggest benefit of using digital payments is to save your operations time. With labor and supply chain shortages still hanging on our shoulders, your operations team is pressed on their most valuable commodity, time. 

Our bill pay tool saves your team from manually verifying and collecting invoices, writing checks and reconciling spreadsheets. Simply upload an invoice and we handle the rest. 

You can see your bills, approve those that should be paid and send payments all from one platform. 

SECURE YOUR PAYMENTS 

Our online payment transactions are secure and provide a digital paper trail showing you exactly who did what and when. You can also easily track your digital payments to see when they were posted by your vendor. 

Our Bill Pay solution allows you to monitor and control approval workflows, giving permissions to different users on who could approve payments giving you more control over your entire payments process. 

Greater flexibility should be key to paying your bills and planning cash flow. You shouldn’t be chained to a desk tracking down invoices and writing physical checks. You should be using a system that works with you and gives you the flexibility to pay bills as needed. 

We’re not saying you should be paying bills from the beach while on vacation. We’re just saying with our system, you can. 

GETTING STARTED 

Schedule time with our team to learn more about streamlining your Accounts Payables and getting set up today! 

Technology in restaurant operations continues to play a very important role and is no longer a luxury but a necessity.  

Accounts Payable is the next back-office task to be taken over by automation eliminating the need for manual data entry and long invoice life-cycles. Restaurants are inundated with invoices on a daily basis. Keeping track of these physical paper invoices proves to be easier said than done. Paper invoices are easily lost, damaged or thrown in the trash before they ever hit your books. If a paper invoice does make it to your accountant, the time they are inputting with manual data entry is absurd. 

It’s not sustainable to maintain this analog process anymore. It’s time to manage your AP more efficiently with our automated AP technology.  

So, how does our Accounts Payable Automation Software work? 

Upload and Digitize: Your team easily uploads an invoice by snapping a photo as the delivery arrives at your kitchen. We then digitize that invoice and keep it in a digital filing cabinet. No more stacks of paper invoices on your desk! 

Invoice Coding: After snapping a photo of an invoice, our software digitizes each invoice pulling out the item, quantity purchased pack size and price. We do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to.  

Approval Workflows: Customize your approver rules for as much (or little) control as you would like. Ensure your team stays on track and easily review and approve invoices, then move on with their day.   

Pay: Select the invoices you want directly from our app. Pay supplies by either cc, check or ACH. Payments are sent directly to your vendor! 

Accounting Integration: Map ingredients directly to your Chart of Accounts once. We’ll take care of it moving forward. Did we mention we work seamlessly with Quickbooks Online so you don’t have to? 

The key takeaway is that you can continue to use resources on a manual AP process, or you can embrace technology to automate manual tasks and focus on more important initiatives. 

Schedule time with our team to learn more today! 

Whether we accept it or not—we all know how helpful technology is these days. It’s the key to solving most, if not all our problems. Today, technology is used in healthcare, education, retail, foodservice—all of the above. It’s everywhere. 

The point is it makes life easier. When you’re a restaurant operator, you’re constantly looking for ways to reduce unnecessary time that’s spent and save money, right? It seems like we’re all running short on time and spending more money than usual these days. 

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. We know you’re already implementing the use of technology in certain areas of your operation, I mean, who isn’t? Why not implement it into one more? Your Accounts Payables.  

Let’s look at 5 ways using online account payable tools make your life easier. 

FLEXIBILITY 

Have you ever come home from work and realized you’ve forgotten to pay a bill? It happens too often—we’re all human. Wouldn’t it be convenient to pay your bills from anywhere using whatever method works for you? 

When using technology, you open a door to flexibility. What works for you may not work for someone else. So, with a variety of options on how to pay, when to pay, and where to pay from, there’s bound to be a way that works for everyone. 

You’re not limited to any one place or method; you do what works best for you. The plus side is your vendor isn’t affected by your choice of payment either. It’s a win-win situation! 

SAVE MONEY 

When you go paperless, you save a LOT of money. No more purchasing paper checks, envelopes, stamps, ink—literally anything you’d need to get your bills out the door and into the hands of your vendors. 

No more transaction fees or bank fees! Let’s face it, you’re probably paying anywhere from $10-$40 per transaction and that adds up FAST. That means you could be paying up to $400 extra for just TEN transactions. It’s 2022, ditch the bank, go online. ACH transfers are in. 

Even if you pay with a credit card online, your fee would still be cheaper than before! So, it doesn’t matter what method you choose for paying as long as you’re using an online Accounts Payable tool. 

Let’s also not forget the amount of time your staff may be putting in to pay those bills—sometimes even staying overtime to crank them out. Wouldn’t it be nice to use that time doing something else? If you’re paying your staff to spend all their time paying your bills, it’s time to switch over to technology. 

SECURITY 

Everyone’s worst nightmare is getting their check lost or stolen in the mail. It happens to everyone. When you go digital, you won’t have to worry about this ever being an issue again. 

Digital payments leave a clear trail the second the money leaves your account. Both you and your vendor will receive confirmations during this process, and you’ll even be able to check the status of your payment the minute it leaves your account to the minute it enters theirs. 

Was it delivered? Was it processed? When was it received? Are there any changes to be made? You’ll be able to answer all of these questions in an instant when you switch your Accounts Payable online. 

There’s really nothing to worry about when using technology for your bill pay. Online payment tools come with encryption and security protocols that help you avoid fraud and keep your payment secure. 

UNDERSTANDING CASH FLOW 

When you pay your bills the old traditional way with paper, it’s easy to lose track of your cashflow. The process of recording your payment data in an excel spreadsheet is tedious and labor-intensive. 

It gets complicated and hard to keep up with, and once you forget to input one data entry, you fall right off track. And let’s not forget how difficult it is to view ALL of your data at once. It’s nearly impossible! 

When you switch to technology, you can monitor your spend, compare your cash-in/cash-out, and easily view any problems that may occur. 

This all contributes to making better business decisions and helps your streamline your operation’s cashflow. 

REDUCE ERRORS AND STREAMLINE INVOICES 

We all make mistakes, we’re human. So it’s no surprise that cutting edge technology is exactly what we need to avoid these errors and streamline our operations. 

Switching to automated Accounts Payable means you’ll reduce errors you may accidentally miss when manually entering data into your old-school excel spreadsheet after making a payment. Maybe you even overpaid or underpaid your vendor, it happens, but it doesn’t have to continue this way. 

When you use account payable technology, you eliminate room for error because the software is able to extract the exact data directly from your electronic invoices—this is where Food Cost Management technology comes into play. It perfectly reads and identifies the exact amount owed and the date of which it needs to be paid. It’s trustworthy and ground-breaking. 

No more paper invoices! Everything goes electronic. The technology is able to identify important points in your invoices just by scanning through a quick screenshot. 

Your staff can even approve, authorize, or reject payments directly through their phone. Each step of the process is recorded in the case of needing to go back to review the actions that were taken to pay the bill. 

What more could you ask for? 

AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNTS PAYABLE TODAY 

Automating your payment process is crucial in 2022 to help avoid error, save money, and salvage time. 

Embrace technology and streamline your Accounts Payables process! 

Schedule time with us to learn more and get set up today!  

An easy way to ensure you are profitable is to align the cost of your recipes with your selling price.

At the end of the day running a restaurant is a numbers game. Plain and simple, but let’s be honest, not everyone is a numbers person.

I remember costing out recipes and menus in my old kitchen.

I would spend hours in the kitchen like a mad scientist in his lab, diving into math problems, the likes of which I haven’t seen since high school. I was converting ounces to quarts or asking myself “How many grams in a fluid cup?”

I was portioning, cutting, measuring and weighing the breakdown of every ingredient in my recipes, down to the grain of rice. “I would have the most comprehensive recipes ever!” I thought.

After HOURS of work, I was finally able to sit back in the glory of my achievement and look at my finalized menu.

That’s when I began to realize that the margins on some of my recipes weren’t where they once had been. With the rising prices of ingredients, some of my most popular menu items were LOSING me money. To top it all off, my distributors were sending substitutions for products I had never purchased before.

This meant that if one ingredient changed or there was a price increase, I would have to go back into my spreadsheets and constantly update product changes and prices. What a headache.

Now some restaurants are blessed to have full time staff members to manage the numbers.

But not me.

Aside from being a chef, I unwillingly also signed up to be the in-house plumber, fridge repairman, and personal therapist for the wait staff. On top of that I was also expected to be the numbers person.

The number of hats I was wearing aside from running the kitchen was growing, and all the moving parts involved in costing out my menu were completely out of my control. So unfortunately, like many chefs, recipe costing got put on the back burner.

The Problem

The problem with recipe costing is that there are so many variables constantly changing.

Ingredient prices are skyrocketing, vendors are substituting ingredients you typically buy due to product shortages, and on a busy Friday night you run out to the local store to pick up supplies.

The price you paid for ground beef pre-pandemic is nowhere close to what you are paying today, meaning your margins have shrunk immensely on your burger.

Unless you are inspecting every invoice that comes through your door with a magnifying glass and noting ingredient price trends, you have no idea what menu items are costing you today.

This is bad. Every day that you are unaware of your profit margins is a day that you could potentially be bleeding money!

The Solution

Hopefully by now you get the gist of this post. Recipe Costing is SO important but also extremely difficult to maintain.

Orderly was developed for chefs, by chefs, to be the easiest and most reliable food costing tool on the market. The less time you spend in our software the more time you have to do what you truly love!

Simply build your recipes in Orderly once.  One time.

That’s it.

With every invoice that comes into the system, Orderly will automatically update the ingredient price showing you the true cost of the recipe today and the current margins based off your selling price!

This allows you to make many updates and revisions as a problem arises.

Buying a new ingredient or your vendor sent a substitution? No problem!

Orderly groups together substitute ingredients with the products you typically buy.

This means that regardless of whether you bought Hormel Apple Wood Smoked Bacon last week or Oscar Myer Apple Wood Smoked Bacon this week, Orderly will group these like items together and use them interchangeably in your recipes depending on which item you bought most recently, giving you the most up today price for every menu item you build in Orderly!

Recipe costing is something that NEEDS to be done to ensure you are running a profitable business.

FINALLY, a recipe costing solution resilient to substitutions and supplier changes. 

Say goodbye to daily recipe maintenance!

Ready to put your recipe costing on autopilot and receive up-to-date food cost insights?

Reach out today and our team will be happy to discuss how Orderly can help!