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Are You Leaving Meat on the Bone with Your Approach to Restaurant Clients?

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September 2, 2021
Generate your own business growth by empowering theirs

Accountants have done essential work helping restaurants navigate and survive throughout COVID, working overtime to analyze the numbers, applying for PPP loans and RRF grants, and finding the best path forward.

Maybe you couldn’t save all your restaurant clients, but you’re certainly closer and more valuable than ever with those you did lead through.

Momentum is pouring into the restaurant space. We’re on the brink of a historic revival, and they need your help more than to maximize profits and chart the best path forward.

It doesn’t matter if you’re experienced in the space or have traditionally avoided it — the opportunity is there, and the best restaurant accountants will maximize it by leveraging tools such as xtraCHEF’s restaurant AP automation software to optimize financial and operational management for their clients.

These tools help you and your restaurant clients:

  • Supersize operational insights to optimize the business
  • Boil down expenses from vendor inaccuracies
  • Carve out tedious process inefficiencies and human error

Continue reading to learn how xtraCHEF’s AP automation and invoice processing empower your restaurant clients to do more with less – while empowering you to become a sticky, cornerstone partner in their business.

 

“xtraCHEF streamlined the entire accounts payable process for our clients. By removing the manual data entry and coding by line item, we have cut human errors down dramatically, saved hours of data entry each week, and increased the usefulness of our reporting.” – Terence Hanley, CPA, Esq., Managing Member, Find a Way LLC

1. Supersize operational insights to optimize the business

Our end goals are the same – to empower owners/operators to make data-driven decisions on restaurant budgets and forecasting as well as across their operation.

Plenty of your accounting peers use xtraCHEF to achieve this goal. And in doing so, they enhance relationships with clients through real-time insights, alerts, and reports on critical food costing and other metrics.

Crack the shell on new, valuable touch points with your restaurant client with something as simple as our Product Price Fluctuation. This simple, automated alert may mean the world to a restaurant operator who’s used to only hearing from their accountant once a month.

All you have to do is forward on a report from our system and say:

“Hey, the cost of chicken has gone up 10% since you ordered last. Just want to make sure you’re aware.”

What takes you all of two minutes to receive and forward can translate into an actionable and reassuring. And that’s just the lowest of the low-hanging fruit.

2. Boil down expenses from vendor inaccuracies

Digital invoice processing identifies and alerts you and/or your clients to irregularities with each processed order. What if a vendor sends your client 10 cases of caviar instead of 10 containers? That’s an expensive and obvious mistake.

They’re not always this obvious, but they are surprisingly frequent.

According to an analysis of over 10,000 restaurant invoices, at least one included an overcharge 35% of the time. That is over 10% higher than the average overcharge inclusion rate across all industries (23%).

It’s critical that you and/or your clients track vendor mistakes as they can really add up over time. And this vendor accountability is especially key when so many restaurant products spoil, spill, or are easily left out of orders.

xtraCHEF helps monitor, detect, and remedy all these mistakes with precise vendor accountability. This offers another great touchpoint opportunity to inject valuable insights into your client relationship.

3. Carve out human error and tedious process inefficiencies

Your clients’ staff are always on the move – prepping for, working, or cleaning up after service. They get out late, stay out later, get up, and do it all over again.

These are the same people that are receiving and sometimes inputting the invoice information you depend on to do your work…

Our automations mitigate inevitable errors from manual data entry. You can rest easy with xtraCHEF data analysis because it originates with a photo or scan. No need for manual data entry.

Be done with paper invoices!

And the benefits keep on cooking. xtraCHEF makes paper invoices obsolete once the data has been captured. Free your clients from keeping up with the daily flood of invoices, storing them in a safe place, and even paying to ship them to you.

Do More with Less for Your Restaurant Clients with xtraCHEF

The restaurant industry understands The Myth of Sisyphus better than anyone. And you’re there next to them encouraging them to keep pushing the boulder.

Lean on xtraCHEF to help you help your restaurant clients manage, optimize, and grow their operation – and your business too!

Anecdotally, we can help an AP clerk scale from managing 10 locations/ week to 40 locations/week.

And in our remote world, xtraCHEF enables you to open your business to national clientele. Position your business as a savvy leader in the space and give clients an easy-to-use platform to share invoices. Even if you already have a digital system via DropBox or other document clouds, xtraCHEF offers so much more for you and your clients.

You’re leaving value on the table without AP automation and the rest of xtraCHEF’s feature set.

Give clients a quick look at their operational health across locations. Help them drill down to specific metrics within a single location. Show them where money is being spent across their operation and identify spending tweaks to achieve short- and long-term goals.