Efficiency Builders That Power Restaurant Growth

COGS-Well Team
Sep 23
3 min read

Efficiency turns messy tasks into smooth, repeatable processes – especially in the restaurant industry. Many operators still handle core processes like invoice processing, inventory counts, and recipe management manually, or with systems that aren't synced.

COGS-Well takes the heavy lifting out of those tasks while integrating with your existing workflow, empowering your team to operate faster, more accurately, and with fewer headaches.

From Inbox to Inventory: Automated Invoice Processing

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If your team is still processing invoices manually, you know how time-consuming and error-prone this can be. With COGS-Well, invoices are simply scanned and uploaded, automatically updating both your inventory and accounting systems.

Inventory items and costs stay current, and you get a real-time view of where your money is going. This ongoing invoice automation saves hours every week (no manual entry), improves timeliness, and reduces mistakes.

“COGS-Well’s invoice scanning and audit service saves each of our managers 1.5 to 2 hours per week. For 13 locations, it is also saving me 4 hours per week at the home office.” – Billy Williams, IT Manager, Collier Restaurant Group

“Before COGS-Well, we were just putting in a full invoice amount into QuickBooks. COGS-Well does a line item read of all the invoices, then posts the invoice data that goes into QuickBooks for us. We just scan the data.” - Brenton Woodruff, COO, Café Ficelle

Accurate Inventory Counts in Less Time

Most operators find that counting and valuing inventory using spreadsheets takes a considerable amount of time and is not very accurate. With COGS-Well, item costs are updated automatically, and new or substitute items are added to the system with no additional effort.

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You can also count by storage location in shelf-to-sheet order, which speeds the process, reduces mistakes, and delivers cleaner reporting after each count.

Recipe Costing Beyond Your Gut Feeling

If you do some level of recipe costing and modeling, a system like COGS-Well is much more efficient than trying to crunch the numbers on your own. COGS-Well automatically keeps ingredients and prices up to date, doing the math for you. Plus, built-in tools enable you to model target costs, prices, and profits for your sales items instantly.

“When it’s time to cost out new menu items, COGS-Well makes this seamless. If it's a new fish, I'll take everything except for the protein out of an existing recipe and then add the new protein. We save a lot of time with costing exercises because back in the day, we just did everything by hand over and over again.” - Peyton Strait, Director of Procurement, Lure Fish House

Keeping Multiple Locations in Sync

If you handle transfers between locations or a commissary, inventory and cost adjustments can feel like a full-time job when done by hand. COGS-Well streamlines the process: managers submit transfer requests, alerts are triggered, the transfers get fulfilled, and the adjustments happen automatically.

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Pair this with multi-site reporting, and you get a clear picture of inventory levels, costs, and performance across all locations. You can quickly view and compare your cost of sales, inventory usage, usage variance, sales mix, and more across multiple sites.

“The COGS-Well transfer features are increasing accuracy. The export of transfer adjustments to NetSuite is saving me 2 to 3 hours per month.” – Erica Raihala, Finance & Administration Manager, Bambuza Hospitality Group

“Our ability to see what's going on daily with COGS-Well has been great. You'd have the benefit with one, but especially for multiple locations, it has been awesome in terms of inventory management, ordering, and everything else.” - Brenton Woodruff, COO, Café Ficelle

Streamlined Accounting Processes

Manual accounting entries are still common. Things like purchases, inventory valuations, and transfer adjustments are often entered into the General Ledger by hand.

Systems like COGS-Well integrate directly with your accounting system, so these entries can easily be reviewed and then flow in automatically. That reduces double entry, speeds up month-end, and improves the accuracy of your books without extra effort from your team.

Accuracy That Powers Efficiency

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Every manual process opens the door to mistakes. COGS-Well helps make inventory valuations, cost of goods sold, recipe costs, and accounting adjustments more accurate – and accuracy itself is an accelerant for restaurant teams. Clean data enables you to act faster, spot issues sooner, and reduce the time spent fixing avoidable errors.

By replacing outdated processes with automated, accurate workflows, COGS-Well helps you reclaim time, reduce headaches, and achieve more consistent results across your operation.