What’s Hiding in Your Foodservice Distributor Invoices?

As a restaurant operator, you probably already know the value of digitizing invoices. Paper documents are subject to getting lost or damaged and take up valuable space in your back office. Manually entering invoice information into your accounting, inventory or food cost management software is time-consuming and prone to error.

With today’s technology, digitizing invoices is a painless process – just snap a pic or scan a batch to easily upload your invoices, bills, receipts, etc. to your restaurant management software. xtraCHEF customers are accustomed to this, capturing thousands of invoices every day in thousands of restaurants across the U.S. Once you move from paper to pixels, purchases are electronically cataloged, easily searchable, accurate, and accessible to anyone in your organization.

But that’s just the beginning. Buried in your invoices awaits a treasure trove of information that you can use to improve your restaurant’s finances.

Read on to learn how accurate line-item invoice data can give you the power to better manage purchases and inventory, analyze ingredient price trends, easily determine the cost of every recipe, and more.

Manage purchases.

Digitizing your invoices allows you to make better purchasing decisions. Browse ingredients in your own product catalog so you never order the wrong item. View past purchase prices and track how they have changed over time.

Get inventory right.

Inventory management can often seem unmanageable, weighed down by complex, time-consuming processes and inaccurate data. By digitizing your invoices, you can generate searchable and sortable inventory data that makes creating lists and taking counts a breeze. Easily view new or updated items to make sure they’re being inventoried properly.

Additionally, with digitized invoices, you can get accurate inventory values based on your last purchase price(s). With xtraCHEF, pack size and unit of measure are automatically converted to avoid calculation errors.

Track food costs.

Digital invoices provide unprecedented visibility into food costs — one of the most critical components of restaurant profitability. Today’s software pulls accurate food cost data directly from invoices and subtracts them from your set budget. You’ll see how your money is being managed and what’s left to spend.

Additionally, you’ll catch price changes and even be able to flag if you’re paying different prices from location to location. Data keeps vendors honest and puts you in a better position to negotiate.

Catch mistakes and adjustments.

Vendor invoices aren’t always accurate. Critical details like pack size, catch weight, and units of measurement could be wrong. They also need to account for adjustments and substitutions  — and much of that information is written by hand in the margin. Invoice digitization allows you to catch mistakes and track adjustments.

Calculate recipe costs and trends.

The total cost of each plate is much easier to determine after digitizing invoices. When working with paper, calculating recipe costs is a painstaking process of manually listing each individual ingredient and its cost — with no accounting for price fluctuations. Instead, generate recipes that automatically populate with the correct plate cost given the ingredients you have purchased. Now, you can respond to price changes in real-time and substitute ingredients when plate costs climb too high.

Shifting to digital revolutionized Bonanno Concepts, a portfolio of nine chef-driven restaurants in the Denver area. Learn how the group used xtraCHEF to save its chefs four to 10 hours per week of manual data entry equating to $600 per week in savings from hourly wages.

Interested to learn how xtraCHEF can help your restaurant digitize invoices and automatically generate metrics? Request a demo with one of our Product Specialists today.