While managing Accounts Payable is tough, Accounts Payable for restaurants is a different beast altogether. The high volume of invoices with diverse content, and price fluctuations make the restaurant accounts payable a tad difficult and tedious for a restaurant business that already suffers from inadequate staffing.
As a remote accounting firm specialising in Restaurant Accounts Payable Services we are often consulted by restaurant businesses who aim to improve their Accounts Payable. We suggest Restaurant Accounts Payable Automation as a viable solution to tame the beast and in this blog, we explain why.
Here we first identify the problems unique problems faced by restaurants and then help you understand how AP automation can solve these problems for you. If you are a restaurant business mulling over AP automation tools then this blog is for you. Read on:
Common AP Problems Faced by Restaurant Business:
High volume of diverse invoices: Restaurants every day deal with multiple hundreds of invoices every month which continue to grow year on year. Also, from a single item to 200-item massive purchases, the invoices come with a diverse content making it difficult to enter into the accounting system.
Receiving the invoices, uploading, approving and paying – the whole process gets further worse at restaurants that use legacy systems. Problems arise in audit, workflow making it difficult to further scale the process or glean insights for optimization.
Unpredictable changes to invoice: Given the restaurants have the deal with perishable goods they do suffer changes in prices. Few products may not make it to the delivery and this can demand edits in the invoice. Given the high volume of diverse invoice restaurants deal with, getting back to make necessary edits can be tough to make. More on how frequent price changes create problems for restaurant AP below.
Frequent changes in prices: Restaurant essentially runs on labour and food – the two most volatile economy types in the market and as a result a restaurant has to manage a lot of fluctuations. Restaurants have to deal with a whole lot of these fluctuating costs and it can be difficult to track them for optimal invoice and cost management. Without an adequate tracking mechanism, the restaurant operator may lose track of the pieces and as a result, margins suffer.
How AP Automaton can help improve Restaurant AP?
Automated AP centralizes and streamlines the invoice processing by automating the repetitive tasks and minimizing the manual work to give you greater visibility over the entire process. By automating time-taking parts of invoice processing and management, Restaurant AP solutions save time and give more leg space for extracting strategic insights.
Automating the data entry can help cut down the errors and save time. Given it offers centralized and quick access editing the invoices in line with the corrections is simplified too.
Leveraging its automation and reporting capabilities automated restaurant AP solutions provide price tracking which helps restaurant agents to keep an eye on the price changes to act accordingly. Monitoring the price changes across geographic locations, vendors and periods enable operators to make informed negotiations.
In short, Restaurant AP can get you done more with less while improving your accuracy and giving you a strategic edge in this margin-sensitive business. Restaurant AP provides you with an automated solution that helps you make this possible provided your AP resources can leverage it adequately.
However given most businesses are stretched to their limit, they seldom fully leverage the capabilities of the Restaurant AP solution due to a lack of adequate resources and expertise. In a few cases, small and medium restaurant businesses may not risk investing in automation tools at this point. In such cases, one can fully leverage the benefits of Restaurant Accounts Payable Services by outsourcing them to Back Office Accountants.
Back Office Accountants – Best Remote Accounting Firm for Restaurant Accounts Payable Services:
As one of the most trusted remote accounting firms in the market for more than a decade now, Back Office Accountants has been helping businesses improve their accounting performance. While we offer a complete spectrum of back-office accounting services to all types of business, we specialize in Accounts Payable Services for restaurants and real estate businesses. Equipped with automated AP tools that are custom-made to restaurants we have been helping restaurants automate and streamline their AP process for improved financial performance. If you are a restaurant that is looking to outsource your Accounts Payable then you can find more information about our Restaurant AP services here: https://www.backofficeaccountants.com/accounts-payable-for-restaurants/
