From Prep to Profit: How AP Automation Lets Chefs and Managers Focus on the Food

When chefs and restaurateurs think about their favorite parts of building and running a food business, it’s unlikely that many would conjure up invoice processing, exception handling, vendor payments, and other finance tasks. They’d rather be focusing on crafting menus, creating recipes, and offering guests unforgettable dining experiences, but sometimes they get bogged down in paperwork.

Running a successful restaurant takes more than great food — it requires smart operations behind the scenes. With Ottimate’s AI-powered AP automation, chefs, managers, and finance teams are streamlining workflows, eliminating manual busywork, and unlocking time to focus on what matters most: the guest experience. Here’s how forward-thinking restaurants are turning AP into a strategic advantage:

• Free up 100+ hours of labor: Restaurant leaders like David Barzelay are reclaiming time with AP automation, shifting focus from bookkeeping to Michelin stars.
• Save time, reduce errors, eliminate paper: Chefs at Karl Strauss and Cherry Lane Ventures now approve invoices from their phones, instead of chasing paper and doing manual data entry.
• Smarter spending at a glance: With Ottimate, restaurants track real-time price fluctuations in ingredients, empowering chefs to protect margins without sacrificing quality.
• Keep managers on the floor, not in the back office: AP automation lets staff spend more time with guests and teams, not buried in admin.

Providing bandwidth to build a two-Michelin-star restaurant

In 2009, David Barzelay was laid off by a law firm. He saw it as the opportunity to change career directions completely and began hosting dinner parties under the name Lazy Bear, an anagram of his last name. Diving into his passion for food, Chef David soon expanded into pop-up dining experiences in a secret location. He took over a bi-level space in San Francisco’s Mission District in 2014. Building the Lazy Bear brand into what would become a two-Michelin-starred restaurant required 100+ hour weeks, leaving little time to focus on finance. 

“Honestly, if I had to do all of that accounting, I’m not sure that I would even be interested in operating restaurants,” Barzelay said. “At no point could I have handled the incredible number of demands on my time. Decision-making, guiding the team, the menus, everything else, and also doing all that bookkeeping, that would just be impossible.” 

His business partner looked for a solution to this time-crunch problem and found Ottimate. Deploying it to handle invoices and payments for up to 40 vendors has allowed Barzelay to keep the quality level high at Lazy Bear, open the acclaimed cocktail bar True Laurel, and still have time for his wife and three children. 

“I don’t have to do anything because the last thing I want to spend my time on is paying bills, invoices, processing, all of that,” Barzelay said. “I want it to happen automatically, which is exactly what we get from Ottimate. I personally spend no more than 15 minutes a week on bookkeeping.”

Simplifying approvals and spend management for chefs and restaurant managers 

While backpacking through Australia, college friends Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner discovered a unique drinking and dining experience at brew pubs. Realizing there was nothing like this back home in San Diego, they opened the Karl Strauss Brewing Company in 1989. 

From the moment the doors opened, Cramer and Rattner’s business was at the forefront of the burgeoning craft brewing scene that has been on the rise ever since. But even as they continued to create innovative drinks and menus, there were some operational inefficiencies around invoice processing and other financial workflows. 

“The GM or the head chef were really the only people who coded things,” said Karli-Mae Ochoa, senior accountant & financial analyst at Karl Strauss. “Those invoices needed to be hand-coded or written out between what accounts it needed to hit. They used to have to hand-key all of those separately and do all of those manual calculations, write it on the invoice, and then sign it.”

Realizing that such staff would be better off spending their efforts on curating ingredients for new culinary creations and devising innovative ways to incorporate them with world-class beers, the company’s back-office leadership sought an AP automation solution. Since implementing Ottimate, invoice approvals no longer take up time in the tap room or kitchen. 

“I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our chefs. [Ottimate] saves them a ton of time,” Ochoa said. “There’s an app on their phone; they can just go in and approve invoices at home on the couch, when they have downtime. They don’t have to take up time at the restaurant.” 

Another benefit is that chefs and leadership no longer have to devote hours each week to the front end of accounting processes, thanks to the wide range of options that Ottimate provides for invoice capture and the system’s automatic coding. 

“Ottimate has been phenomenal,” Ochoa said. “It’s saved time for us, not just in accounting, but also at the restaurant level and for the managers as well. No more paper shuffling back and forth, no more packets coming in from the restaurants, and no more coding because everything’s pre-coded. So it saves everybody time. We all love it.”

Karl Strauss has extended its use of Ottimate to spend management. This allows staff members to keep track of vendors’ price changes, so they can always get the best deals and control costs. 

“Our head chef, assistant head chef, and district managers — really all of the higher-up brewpub staff — love that information, [and] absolutely use it,” Ochoa said. “They go in and see the price fluctuations and things like that. They have all of the reporting. I see the emails where our head chef says, ‘Yeah, coffee has risen over the past couple of months,’ or talks about the fluctuations in the price of meat and other more expensive items. So I know he’s looking at it, because he can get that data straight from Ottimate.”

Providing real-time ingredient pricing and smooth invoicing

Atelier Crenn prides itself on serving the finest French cuisine in the Bay Area. With the original location becoming the first female-led U.S. restaurant to earn two Michelin stars, Bar Crenn earning another, and Petit Crenn earning critical acclaim, it’s evident that founder/chef Dominique Crenn and her staff have needed laserlike focus on food, not invoices and other financial documentation. 

“If I’m paying a chef de cuisine and I see him copying data from a piece of paper to a computer, I don’t look at that as being productive,” said Maxime Larquier, director of operations at Atelier Crenn. “I want them to be with their team and cooking, talking to the guests, and doing their job of bringing more value to the company.”

Implementing Ottimate to manage invoices and payments has provided the level of clarity and concentration that Atelier Crenn’s chefs need to maintain their Michelin star-worthy standards. 

“Instead of having to rifle through a bunch of file cabinets to look at the price of caviar this week, I just type the invoice or item section into Ottimate, it easily comes up, and I’m able to stay up to date,” said Nick Anichini, chef de cuisine at Atelier Crenn. 

While the cuisine coming out of Atelier Crenn’s kitchen takes top priority, the administrative side of the business must also run smoothly. Ottimate helps staff find the sweet spot. 

“We collect the invoices throughout the day, and at the end of the night, I or one of my sous chefs will enter them into a running decline budget,” Anichini said. “This keeps us current with spending for the week. Then we’ll scan them into Ottimate.”

When they’re creating new dishes, Anichini and his fellow chefs need to access up-to-date information on ingredients from their suppliers in seconds, so they can order precisely what’s required to create mouthwatering dishes. 

“On the creative side, when working with artists like Dominique, it’s definitely less predictable, which makes it fun,” Anichini said. “When the food costing comes along and we have a dish that we want to work on and we have the ingredients, there are a lot of tools that we can use. When I’m in front of my computer, I take a look at Ottimate.”

AP automation is also helping chefs at the restaurants run by Cherry Lane Ventures – Andiamo! and 68 Degrees Kitchen – to capture invoices with the tap of a finger. 

“Ottimate is super easy to use,” said Will Strong, senior advisor at Cherry Lane Ventures. “The chef snaps the picture with the app, and immediately, the invoice is in the system. And she doesn’t have to think about it anymore. Digitizing the information eliminates so many human hours.”

Keeping restaurant managers on the floor and out of the office

An AP automation solution such as Ottimate doesn’t just benefit chefs, but also those who oversee day-to-day operations at restaurants. While managers will always have some administrative tasks, former Del Frisco’s CTO Juan Salas was eager to maximize the amount of time they spent interacting with guests and staff at the chain’s 71 locations by minimizing the time spent capturing invoices. “How do we end up keeping restaurant managers on the floor and away from the office?” he asked. 

The answer was to implement Ottimate. Now, managers and other staff use a convenient mobile app to take pictures of incoming invoices. These are matched to the related POs and, when applicable, receipts. The system sends 99.5 percent of these straight through to Microsoft Dynamics ERP and automatically flags the few that need manual intervention to resolve a discrepancy. All the while, Ottimate is updating the P&L for each Del Frisco’s location and creates visual reports that let managers keep better track of their spending. 

“One thing I’d encourage other restaurants to do that we saw tremendous value in is being able to have real-time access to data,” Salas said. “So as invoices come in from Ottimate, within 24 to 48 hours, they’re posted to the  P&L. One of our objectives with ERP systems is to ensure that we have up-to-date data and a real-time P&L with minimal administration for each restaurant manager. Ottimate fits nicely in that niche.” 

Ready to reduce the amount of time your restaurant spends on AP processing? Schedule an Ottimate demo today.