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Overview:
With the pairing of two best-in-class solutions, Ottimate and COGS-Well, simply scan and upload invoices and you have done everything needed to automate invoice processing, update accounts payable, manage vendor payments, control inventory, cost recipes, and analyze your food and beverage costs.
Invoice Automation:
It starts with scanning and uploading invoices to Ottimate. The invoice images are automatically converted into digital data and then exported to your Accounts Payable system.
Invoice scanning eliminates sorting, recording, or mailing invoices. Coding expenses is also eliminated because they will already be mapped to your general ledger accounts. The time savings and increase in accuracy are substantial.
“Ottimate not only automates AP, but also allows us to keep excellent records of invoices and to monitor everything coming into our restaurants. We constantly refer to both the photos and digital records of invoices that Ottimate stores for us when we need to troubleshoot all sorts of issues that come up. We also use it regularly to identify when we may be missing invoices from vendors”. Noah Kopito, Director of Operations, Mamahuhu Restaurants.
”The biggest benefit from Ottimate has been the ease of operating across locations. We have six locations and being able to quickly run full-company reporting or see vendor/item spending trends across the company is very valuable. The user interface is easy and my GMs check purchasing data on the Spend Analysis tool each week to get an estimate of where their profitability (and thus, bonus) will land for a given period”. Kyle Zuvella, CFO, Lure Fish House.
Payment Automation:
Ottimate’s Bill Pay option makes payments a snap. You can pay any invoice, issued by any vendor, from any device. With Bill Pay you can consolidate the payment process and eliminate printing or mailing checks.
“Check runs used to be my coworker and I reading off numbers and vendors for 30 minutes. Now we use Ottimate for almost all of our bill payments. It’s a lot easier because we don’t have to coordinate our schedules. I do the bulk of the payments, she can do others, and we meet up for five minutes to take care of the rest”. Sarah Young, AP & Inventory Specialist
Inventory Control:
Scanning and uploading invoices for Ottimate also captures the inventory line item detail, converts it into digital data, and imports it into COGS-Well. This data is used to create your inventory item database automatically and to continually track what items you are buying, from what vendors, in what quantity, and at what cost.
“I was immediately attracted to COGS-Well because they could use Ottimate’s integration to capture our invoice history and create our starting inventory database. They provided an opportunity for us to convert a 9 to 12-month implementation process into a few days”. Jennifer Beougher, CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group.
“Before COGS-Well, invoices with the line item detail were being entered manually by our managers. COGS-Well’s integration with Ottimate is providing enormous time savings. Our managers are no longer spending several hours per week behind their keyboards entering invoices.” Rich Ortiz, Director of Finance, Buzz Hospitality.
To make things easy, COGS-Well uses a combination of unique technology and human auditors to update and manage your inventory item database for you.
COGS-Well’s inventory control also has features for counting and valuing the inventory on hand, item cost change alerts, cost trends, ordering, transfers, and commissary management.
“Our inventory spreadsheets were only updated periodically, and the process took a lot of time. Inventory counts used to take a full week every month. Now with COGS-Well, it is only a few hours per month.” Cooper Thurber, PIER 22 Restaurant.
Recipe Management:
You can create, cost, and model pricing or ingredients for menu items in COGS-Well. Your sales mix is imported each day from your Point of Sale system to provide theoretical versus actual inventory cost and usage analysis. You can also use menu analytics to evaluate your menu items for popularity and profitability.
“Better understanding the components of our food cost has been a big benefit of using COGS-Well. How much is inflation, how much is waste, and how much is the sales mix? We had no way of getting at this data before. With COGS-Well’s menu modeling tools comes the power of making better decisions about our menu”. Jennifer Beougher, CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group.
“The integrations between Cogs-Well and Ottimate help us identify cost-related issues more proactively. For example, the invoice details being uploaded automatically - with minimal errors - has allowed us to use the Cogs-Well dashboard to proactively recognize when a menu item has gotten more costly. In the seafood industry, costs jump around quite a bit, so this helps us protect profits and not be too slow to recognize an issue". Kyle Zuvella, CFO, Lure Fish House.
End-to-End Accounts Payable & Inventory Automation:
By combining Ottimate’s AP automation software and COGS-Well’s inventory control and recipe management system, you obtain end-to-end accounts payable and inventory automation. We have installed over 500 restaurants together and our mutual customers will verify the results:
“When we found Ottimate, it was a game changer. We use Ottimate and COGS-Well together and that took us to an even greater level of analysis, allowing us to automate manual processes and keep our fingers on the pulse of cost control”. Will Strong, Senior Advisor, Cherry Lane Ventures.
“We have had a lot of success using the two tools together, as they provide a truly end-to-end solution for managing all aspects of our operations COGS. This starts in the kitchen with Ottimate’s invoice scanning app, and ends in COGS-Well on the Actual COGS report which tells us our food cost - one of the most important measures of our operation's performance”. Noah Kopito, Director of Operations, Mamahuhu Restaurants.