How Growing Restaurant Brands Are Turning AP Into a Profit Driver—While Slashing Invoice Work by 90%

For multi-location restaurant operators, processing invoices isn’t just about reviewing line items — it’s about navigating a complex web of location-specific taxes, vendor pricing, cost centers, and approval workflows. 

When managing hundreds of units across multiple states, a single invoice can impact several profit and loss statements (P&Ls), require custom coding, and involve multiple stakeholders for review and sign-off. Left manual, this process can be a significant bottleneck. 

And more than just time-consuming, this inefficiency often results in missed profit opportunities, poor cash flow visibility, and revenue leakage—costs that scale dangerously with growth.

That’s exactly what B&G Food Enterprises, a top franchisee for Taco Bell, KFC, and Long John Silver’s, faced as they scaled to over 150 quick-service restaurants. With more than 3,000 invoices a month flowing through their system, B&G’s AP team was spending hours each day manually coding, sorting, and routing paperwork — often touching the same invoice five or six times. The administrative burden was unsustainable.

However, with the introduction of Ottimate, B&G slashed invoice processing time by 92%, freed up more than 46 hours of staff time each month, and implemented conditional approval rules that automatically handle multi-location splits and route invoices to the correct personnel. 

What once required manual spreadsheets and daily cutoff times is now streamlined, fast, and flexible — empowering their team to focus on what matters most: supporting growth, not drowning in data entry.

More importantly, by eliminating repetitive tasks and surfacing discrepancies instantly, B&G’s AP team now plays a direct role in protecting profit margins and optimizing spend across 150+ restaurants—without needing more staff.

Automating location-specific coding, processing, and approvals

Brenda and Gregory Hamer started operating their first Taco Bell franchise in Morgan City, Louisiana, in 1982. In the years since, the couple’s company, B&G Food Enterprises, has grown to become the largest Taco Bell franchisee in the state, with additional stores in Mississippi and Texas. The Hamers also added a KFC franchise in 1997 and a Long John Silver’s franchise in 2011.

As their quick-serve empire grew, so too did the amount of administrative work. AP team member Danielle Sauce has worked for B&G for over a decade. She and two colleagues used to rely on a manual workflow to process over 700 invoices that came in each week for the company’s 150 quick-serve restaurants. 

“We did not have any type of automation system,” Sauce said. “We manually coded everything ourselves and keyed everything into our accounting system. Between opening the invoices, sorting them, coding them, keying them, checking them, and scanning them, we probably looked at each invoice five or six times before we were finished with it.”

Coding used to take one minute per invoice, but Ottimate has significantly reduced this time. Reducing processing time for over 3,000 invoices by nearly 92 percent saves approximately 46 hours every month, allowing the B&G team to focus more on value-added tasks. 

“The invoices that already have items automatically mapped and everything take, probably, five seconds,” Danielle reports. “We just make sure the store number’s right, check the date, and then we move on. So it’s cut down on our time drastically.”

Previously, B&G’s accounting team struggled to efficiently process invoices that applied to multiple franchise locations. They had to manually enter location-specific information, such as local taxes, into a spreadsheet. Ottimate eliminated this troublesome step with a custom feature that automatically processes spreadsheets for this invoice type. 

“We have some invoices that are split between 20 locations,” Sauce said. “Before, we were just sitting there, keying in all those lines ourselves. Now, all we do is select that file and tell it where to go, and then it just populates all that coding for us right there in the software.”

Before switching to Ottimate, individual locations used to mail invoices to Sauce and her teammates. The volume of this paperwork was so high that they had to establish a cut-off time for opening new invoices each day, so the deluge wasn’t overwhelming. 

To create a more effective process, B&G needed a way to capture invoices in multiple formats. Ottimate allows the company’s individual locations to choose scanning, taking pictures of invoices through its mobile app, email forwarding, or electronic data interchange (EDI). 

“We’re about 50/50 paper vs. electronic invoices at this point,” Sauce said. “We’re slowly transitioning our utility bills to EDI. In my email, I personally get about 200 PDF invoices a week. As for the paper invoices, we scan those for the most part.” 

Approvals are another stage of the invoice process that Ottimate has positively impacted at B&G. Sauce likes to review certain documents to ensure vendor pricing is accurate, while other invoices need executive sign-off. This process is much smoother with Ottimate’s conditional routing capabilities. 

“We use approval rules to implement those policies in Ottimate,” Sauce said. “Instead of walking paper invoices over to the right person’s pile, we just load everything in Ottimate, and the system routes the invoices to the right approvers.”

Expanding without adding staff

When a restaurant adds a new location, it will inevitably need kitchen, back-of-house, and front-of-house staff onsite. As the number of invoices grows, many food businesses believe that hiring additional staff to process them is inevitable, as it’s typically a time-consuming manual task. After Tatsu-Ya successfully introduced upscale ramen to Austin, Texas, the restaurant’s founders decided to expand their culinary offerings to include izakaya, shabu-shabu, Japanese curries, and more at their new restaurants. But on the administrative side, staff members were already overstretched. 

“Because of our expansion, we were starting to feel the data entry side of things was taking a little bit too much time on our team,” said Gary Rook, VP of finance and human resources. “We had one person on our team who was pretty much just doing invoice data entry every day.” 

With this employee already maxed out with manually entering invoice data into Restaurant365, Rook and his colleagues assumed increasing headcount would be the only way to keep up with the influx of invoices at Tatsu-Ya’s new restaurants. 

“We were at the point where we were looking to hire somebody else to come in and do the data entry,” Rook said. “We figured that would support us for about another four locations. Then we’d have to hire somebody else.”

This part of the expansion plan improved when another software vendor suggested that Tatsu-Ya check out Ottimate. Rook soon realized that the automated GL coding and line-level transcription that the system offered would provide a large leap in efficiency. 

“We used to have the invoice on the screen, and an employee would sit there and key in the GL accounts it was to hit, and what amounts,” Rook said. “That step has been basically eliminated. Now we have just a validation step where we go into Ottimate and make sure that the invoices are coded correctly, and finish the processing there.”

Sarah Young, the Tatsu-Ya AP and inventory specialist tasked with processing invoices, quickly found that Ottimate was transforming the way she worked. 

“Ottimate does have a lot of things automated,” she said. “Once you tag the item, it always gets tagged in the future. Having those GL codes already generated — so I do just a little bit of review — saves a lot of time.”

Ottimate not only improved Young’s job satisfaction and productivity but also allowed Rook to revise his part of Tatsu-Ya’s expansion plan. By reducing the need for additional AP hires, Tatsu-Ya effectively redirected operating capital to high-impact growth initiatives—avoiding sunk labor costs and freeing up budget for expansion.

“We thought that for every four to five locations, we would have had to hire a new employee just for data entry level,” he said. “With Ottimate, we’re at the point where we don’t feel like we even need to backfill that first position.”

Soon, Ottimate was providing such efficiency that the employee who had only been processing invoices could transition into a new role, with her reduced duties being covered by another staff member who now also handles payments and other accounts payable tasks. 

“We went back and crunched the numbers. It was about 25 hours a week that she wasn’t having to sit there,” Rook said. “We’ve actually moved her into an HR role since we switched over to Ottimate.”

Managing invoices after a merger

Overseeing invoice processing is challenging enough for a single restaurant brand. But when two organizations come together, complexity doubles—and so does the paperwork.

One multi-location restaurant group experienced this firsthand during a major acquisition that expanded their footprint to over 300 locations. Suddenly, they weren’t just managing one invoice system—they were juggling two.

Even before the merger, the acquired brand’s AP process was highly manual and time-consuming, with the team printing 5,000+ pages of invoices weekly just to audit them against inventory.

“We had someone dedicated to printing all day,” said the AP manager. “The rest of us would split up the stack and audit page by page. It was a huge pain.”

Post-merger, the invoice volume doubled to 20,000 per month, arriving in multiple formats and requiring strict adherence to payment timelines.

With Ottimate, the finance team transformed their AP process. Electronic invoices were routed directly into the platform, while paper versions were digitized and stored in a searchable repository.

By consolidating everything into one unified system, they eliminated duplicate payments, shortened the monthly close, and gained real-time visibility across both brands—helping protect profit margins during a critical transition.

“Ottimate got us unified,” the AP manager shared. “Instead of jumping between systems or chasing paper, everything’s now in one place. It’s just easier to manage.”

Before Ottimate, retrieving a specific invoice meant calling HQ and digging through paper files. Now, any team member—whether in corporate or at a store—can quickly find what they need, reducing friction and speeding up decision-making.

“It’s made our close process so much more efficient,” she added.

Want to stop profit leaks before they hit your books? See how Ottimate helps restaurant brands optimize cash flow and protect margins? Schedule a personalized Ottimate demo today!