FIXE’d on Success: An Interview with Ryan Handel, Co-Founder & CEO of FIXE

FIXE is a forward-thinking bookkeeping firm dedicated to revolutionizing the accounting process for restaurants. As an Ottimate Partner, FIXE has leveraged Ottimate’s accounts payable automation solutions to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and provide unparalleled service to its clients. 

FIXE Co-Founder and CEO, Ryan Handel, has a deep-rooted connection to the restaurant industry, currently owning multiple restaurant ventures in Los Angeles. This experience has given him firsthand insights into the unique challenges faced by restaurant operators — especially when it comes to managing their finances. 

The Ottimate team recently sat down with Ryan to learn more about how FIXE supports its clients, discuss his experience with Ottimate, and break down advice Ryan has for fellow restaurateurs. 

OTTIMATE: Thank you for speaking with us today! We’re excited to learn more about FIXE and your experience with Ottimate. To start, can you tell us a little bit about FIXE and your role there?

RYAN HANDEL: FIXE is a technology-forward bookkeeping platform that was founded by restaurant people for restaurant people. I own restaurants as well, and I was sick of bookkeeping and accounting the way it was being done. So we put together this platform that uses some third-party software — including our own — in order to facilitate bookkeeping and accounting. And Ottimate has been one of the software solutions we’ve used since day one. 

We offer a complete package, and Ottimate is part of every package every client gets at FIXE. Everybody gets QuickBooks Online, everybody gets Ottimate, and there’s a new piece of software called Loop that we provide as well.

In my role as CEO, the vision and everything comes from me — I have a hand in everything at the company. But I’m a restaurant person to start. So my belief is that we want to implement processes and systems that make it as easy on the restaurant operator as possible. That’s where every decision we make stems from: what makes it easier on the operator. 

OTTIMATE: Before automating your accounts payable, what were the main AP challenges you were looking to overcome?

RYAN: When I had my own outsourced bookkeeping, I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t control it myself as the restaurant owner. It required a lot of email back and forth between myself and the bookkeeper. 

But with Ottimate, I like the fact that it’s an easy user interface for any of our clients and any of our account managers who are initiating the process on their own. It’s very easy to select or deselect invoices that you want to pay or not pay — it makes it a little bit more hands-on, but in a good way. And it requires less emailing, less back and forth, because our clients could just click the button and control it themselves if they didn’t like the payments that we queued up.

OTTIMATE: How did you first discover Ottimate?

RYAN: My partner in my first restaurant introduced me to it. I thought it was great. I had always thought there’s got to be an easier way to process invoices than what we had been doing or what the bookkeeping firm had been doing. 

In my first interaction with it, my old bookkeeper was using QuickBooks Desktop with Ottimate, and they were not using it correctly. They had a lot of issues getting us reports and validating what you guys were doing. So that’s when I moved on and we started using Ottimate ourselves with QuickBooks Online. And that’s kind of how FIXE started, to be honest with you. When we found Ottimate.

OTTIMATE: What were the reasons you chose Ottimate over other AP automation solutions?

RYAN: One of the biggest reasons we use Ottimate — and why we like it better than other competitors out there — is that it really is an enterprise system that allows us to manage a lot of volume with little effort. 

OTTIMATE: And how many invoices does FIXE process each month? 

RYAN: FIXE as a whole processes about 30,000 to 32,000 invoices a month across all of our clients. And then the average FIXE client is probably about 125 invoices a month per location.

OTTIMATE: That’s a lot of invoices! With so many invoices being processed each month, how has Ottimate impacted the onboarding process when you bring on new clients?

RYAN: It’s really easy for us to get a new client up and running. You know, a lot of clients say they went to R365 and it took months to get onboarded. And when we tell them ‘No, we can get you up and running and get all your invoices categorized within a week.’ They’re like, ‘How is it that quick?’ Your system and the way we manage it together allow for those efficiencies. 

OTTIMATE: How do you guide your clients to use Ottimate’s features?

RYAN: We tell our clients that all we want them to do is take a photo of the invoice; or if they can’t take a photo, to forward it to an email, and we’ll take care of everything else. The only thing they have to do is to approve their payments — we’ll queue up a check run for all of their vendors, and then they just have to click approve.

OTTIMATE: How do you manage the categorization and approval process for your clients?

RYAN: We’ve worked with Ottimate to create some custom reporting to audit how things are categorized. And what we tell our clients is to let us categorize everything, and then once every two weeks or once a month, to pull up this report, tell us what we need to change, and we’ll change it — but we don’t want to slow down the process because we have to wait for them to categorize it. 

So we categorize everything, we approve everything, we export everything. We take it from the moment it’s uploaded all the way into the accounting system. And then we queue it up for payment. Our clients just have to click approve. Some clients even want us to just pay the vendors ourselves without their approval, which happens from time to time. 

OTTIMATE: What has been your experience with customizing Ottimate’s features for your needs?

RYAN: It took some back and forth. Our relationship with you guys gives us a little bit of clout, so we had to push a little bit — but it eventually got there. I know you have this new reporting module which is different from your older one, and I know some of the reports in there stem from the conversations that we had with you. I think you guys listened to what we were trying to do and gained an understanding of what happens on the accounting side. 

OTTIMATE: What are some specific results you’ve seen from using Ottimate?

RYAN: Ottimate’s user interface across large groups is one of the biggest benefits to us. Ottimate allows us to work efficiently to charge the price that we do for our clients because we can control a lot of volume without adding a ton of extra man hours and labor. And the other thing I like about it is that it’s gotten a lot better over the years. 

OTTIMATE: So, with your tech-forward outlook, what’s next for FIXE? 

RYAN: We’ve almost finalized our texting platform, where our reports are being delivered through text messages. Obviously, you’re not going to read a P&L in a text message, but we’ll send quick updates about your food costs, your labor costs, or the ingredients that are your biggest pain points. 

We get a lot of operators that have never received a P&L or even know how to review a P&L, they’re new operators. They don’t know if they’re doing well or not, they didn’t go to school for this, or they don’t have years of experience. And so, we’re trying to simplify the metrics that they need to run their restaurant. Part of this simplification is saying, “Hey, these ingredients are jumping up in price and are costing you this much more” or “You’re trending in these three accounts in this way compared to other restaurants of similar sales.” We want to try to create a dashboard that has very basic information like that and that’s also easily deliverable to our clients. 

We know restaurateurs, and they’re not on their computers. They’re not sitting down in an office — they’re on their phones. And so we want to try to give them that information as readily and quickly as possible. We want to extract that from Ottimate into our own dashboard. You guys provide a ton of data, but not all of it’s necessary [for our clients’ purposes]. So we need to simplify that for them. Same with the elements of QuickBooks, with how to read the info, what they should be targeting food costs or labor costs or supplies — things of that nature. We’re trying to educate our clients as much as we’re trying to provide information to them.

OTTIMATE: You recently hired a new CTO. How do you see this impacting your future plans?

RYAN: We’re really focused on our multi-entity reporting right now. That’s the biggest thing that we’re trying to do, which is a QuickBooks-related function and not necessarily an Ottimate-related function. 

Our new CTO, Yogish Pai, was a former product manager and engineer at Intuit, so he comes with a lot of background, which I think is going to be helpful. It will also be helpful for him to start seeing and understanding the pain points that we want to help our clients overcome. So nothing in the immediate future, but I would say starting around Q3, we’ll probably start ramping up with some of that stuff. 

OTTIMATE: What tips would you give to restaurants looking for a bookkeeping solution?

RYAN: At FIXE, we have this mentality that if it’s going to make our life even five minutes faster, we’re going to entertain it. And so that’s what we do, and if we think it’s going to be great for our clients, then we’re going to include it in part of our packages. 

We’re one of the only bookkeeping firms that have in-house software engineers who are actually trying to automate more processes — even automate communication with our clients, automate the way payroll comes in, and automate the way we process the end-of-year 1099 filings, something that’s a very manual process. We’ve come up with a way to automate it. 

Accountants charge a lot of money because it takes them a lot of time to do things. And I think if they reverse that mentality and maybe charge less money but use technology to take on more clients or to work more efficiently, they would be better served. 

For firms that are looking to incorporate technology, I can’t tell anyone specifically what to use and what not to use. But, ultimately, we did not want our clients dictating the technology they wanted to use — we dictated the technology that we knew worked well in order to give the service that we could vouch for. 

And so we set up a price, knowing we could do the work for this price using the tech stack that we have. And if people came to us and said they wanted to use Restaurant365 or Sage or xtraCHEF, we turned them away. We said we’re just not going to do it, that’s not what we do. And this is the only way we could grow as much as we have; it’s because we’ve held firm on the tech stack that we use, and we can work as efficiently as possible that way.

OTTIMATE: That’s great! Thanks for your insights, Ryan. Before we wrap up, any final thoughts you’d like to add?

RYAN: Ottimate has been instrumental in helping us grow from a product standpoint, branding standpoint, and a general workflow and efficiency standpoint. I think you guys are best in class in terms of processing invoices. That’s what we say in all of our sales meetings and our calls: we try to provide the best-in-class software. And in terms of straight processing invoices and paying vendors, there’s no one better.

To learn more about FIXE, visit their website. 

To learn more about Ottimate’s Partnership opportunities, click here.