How Clutch Coffee Bar Fuels Growth with The Ottimate Card

The drive-thru coffee stand has long been a mainstay of the landscape in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, providing generations of coffee lovers with their daily caffeine-fueled fix. Drive through any town in this region, and you’ll see countless small buildings full of personality, each offering their own unique blends of coffee and energy drinks. 

To residents of the area, these businesses inspire fanatical devotion. But outside the region, the coffee stand remains a rare sight.

For two Pacific Northwest-bred entrepreneurs, this presented an opportunity.

Having grown up in Oregon, long-time friends John Anderson and Darren Spicer were no strangers to the wonderful world of coffee stands — which led them to a novel idea. They decided to bring the coffee stand concept somewhere it had never been: 3,000 miles away to North Carolina. 

With a solid idea in place, John and Darren knew they needed help with the finance side of their plans. They enlisted Jake Vandermeer to serve as CFO, rounding out the founding team for what soon became Clutch Coffee Bar.

Fueling Lean Growth with AP Automation

Today, Clutch Coffee has 13 locations and is growing fast. As CFO, Jake’s job is to scale the company to maximize efficiency in their operations — all while keeping their finances in order.

“A huge priority for us is automation, so that we can grow as lean as we can,” says Jake. “We restaurants want to get our invoices into organized financial data. But how are you going to do that without massive amounts of manual work?” 

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Setting out to automate the company’s accounts payable (AP) process, Jake’s initial solution was to create a software solution himself. But in the process, he discovered Ottimate. 

“I said: I’m just going to have everyone send invoices to an email address, I’m going to scrape that email address for PDF attachments, then I’m going to use an OCR library to parse those PDF attachments and translate them into structured data. And I built a program to house it all.

“I was looking at this process when I came across Ottimate. I was like, ‘Ah, there you go. Much better. You guys already built it for me!’”

Once Jake found Ottimate, Clutch Coffee was able to automate their invoice processing and move entirely off of paper.

“We don’t do any paper. All of our invoices get emailed to us. I set up routing rules that automatically forward the emails into Ottimate, which transcribes the invoices and adds GL codes to each line item. If it’s a new line item, we in Finance just quickly map it first. The digital invoices get sent to Clutch Coffee’s stand managers, who review the coding, make any necessary adjustments, and approve the invoices for export into NetSuite.”

But invoice processing was only part of the story; Clutch Coffee still needed an easy way to pay their vendors. But when they tried to put together a solution, they found that navigating the world of payments as a small business came with its own set of challenges.

Locked Out of Card Solutions

With the company in growth mode, Jake wanted invoice and non-invoice outflows to be managed in one system. Turning to Concur’s expense management services, Clutch Coffee soon found themselves part of a growing AP trend of using corporate credit cards to manage spending. 

“We were just using small business credit cards, in our names, and tracking things through Concur,” Jake recalls.

Two key problems soon emerged with this system. The first was that Jake had to supply his own outside card and plug it into the software.

“Concur was fine as an expense reporting solution,” he explains. “But it wasn’t a card issuing and organization solution.

“We recognized that we needed a solution that would scale us up. Not only in terms of the reporting, but to be able to access virtual cards, to issue new cards for people as they come and go, and change locations within the company, which is happening much more frequently now.”

The second problem amplified the first: Clutch Coffee, as a startup business, didn’t qualify for corporate credit card programs.

It’s hard to get corporate credit when you’re small. We wanted something in place now that could scale, and traditional corporate cards aren’t really going to underwrite that.

The solution to these problems came from an unexpected place: Clutch Coffee’s invoice processing system, Ottimate. 

Launching The Ottimate Card

CFOs, like Jake, value the ability to create, control, and edit highly specific virtual cards. They know that corporate card programs with these capabilities offer a better method of control than the old mix of checks in the mail and expense reports in Excel.

So when Ottimate introduced The Ottimate Card in 2021, Jake knew it was the right fit for Clutch Coffee.

With The Ottimate Card, Jake and his team enjoy a corporate card program and expense management platform rolled into one. The platform gives them the power to issue virtual and physical cards with full control over each card’s capabilities. 

“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” says Jake. “I was going through the process of trying to find corporate cards while we were onboarding with Ottimate for invoices. When we learned that the same system had expense management, card issuing, and invoices, that was very attractive.”

As a corporate debit card program, The Ottimate Card doesn’t require a minimum balance, credit check, or personal guarantee. Clutch Coffee was already qualified and was able to get started right away.

“Ottimate allows us to actually get corporate cards, while also having this all-in-one platform that everyone’s already used to for invoices,” says Jake. 

Most corporate cards out there didn’t work for us because of stringent cash balance requirements. Ottimate’s corporate debit cards are way simpler. I can issue one with a single click, control the card’s rules myself, and monitor all of my purchase activity in real time.

Ottimate’s virtual cards (or vCards), in particular, empowered the business to implement a spend management program built around granular control and automation. “The benefit of virtual cards is being able to pre-assign cards and give them to vendors,” Jake explains. “Then you don’t ever have to think about it anymore.”

On top of greater control, Ottimate also offers cashback with every eligible vCard transaction — helping Jake’s accounting team earn revenue simply by paying their bills. 

With the amount of payments Clutch Coffee makes using The Ottimate Card, they were able to earn more than $5,000 in cashback in just six months!

Paying Vendors à la Carde

The Ottimate Card has become Clutch’s default method of payment for all bills and expenses.

“Aside from payroll, rent, and some utilities, we use The Ottimate Card for almost every cash outflow our company has,” Jake shares.

The company’s spend management strategy is simple: The accounting team creates a card for every category of spend for each of its stores, maps those cards to their NetSuite chart of accounts, and gives the card numbers to vendors to keep on file.

All of our virtual cards are pre-assigned to a GL account, so that when transactions come through on them, they’re immediately classified to a particular expense account and exported to NetSuite.

“When we set up a new location, our Director of Growth sets up a group of new cards and gives them to the store. That way all the expense reporting for that store, on a recurring basis, is set up and automated,” explains Jake. “So, for example, we have the utilities card. That’s where we put the internet and the electric bill. There’s also a software card we give to our POS vendor, Spotify, and whatever else.”

This system has made their payments and expense management easier than ever before. 

If we didn’t have the Ottimate Card, those charges would have to be put onto someone’s actual credit card. At the end of the month, they would have to go through and classify those transactions, potentially upload receipts. It’s just a huge pain. So there’s value in locking in straight-through processing, where the vendor charges the card and it goes immediately into Ottimate. That card is already classified, and it gets exported to our ERP and journaled to that expense category. That’s huge.

And thanks to the controls built into The Ottimate Card, Jake knows each card is protected from fraud, theft, and vendor error.

“Across all of our virtual cards, locations, and users, we see exactly what all the monthly limits are and exactly what the usage is. That way, if there’s ever a problem or the vendors are doing something incorrectly, it’s very easy for us to pinpoint. We can see exactly where it is and exactly what the transactions are.

“We recently caught one of our vendors using one card for all of our purchases instead of the specific cards assigned to every store. It was very easy to catch because after a few times doing this, they just blew through the limits we put on that card. They let us know, ‘Hey, this card isn’t working anymore.’ And I was able to check and see: ‘Well, it’s because you’re charging it and not anything else.’’

The fact that I can go in and change the limits anytime, quickly click on a card and immediately have access to all the transactions on that card — it’s all very easy. So yeah, I would say the organization and automation that that enables is definitely paramount for us.

From Petty Cash to CEO Travel: Benefits of Physical Cards

As a full expense management system, The Ottimate Card goes beyond paying vendors. The Clutch team also uses it at every level of their company as an employee expense management platform. 

Physical Ottimate Cards have been especially great for getting rid of petty cash. 

“Everyone at the company at the Store Manager level and above has a physical card. They’re responsible for uploading receipts for their purchases and categorizing those purchases to a GL account.

“The biggest use case is incidentals, like if they run out of ice and have to run to the grocery store or something. Around a new store opening, the charges get a lot more diverse because people are rushing around buying small wares or small equipment or tools. Meanwhile, a Regional Manager or Director of Ops will use the Card for gas, because they’re driving around multiple hours per day to visit different locations.”

At the executive level, the Clutch team usse Ottimate Cards to pay for things you might traditionally associate with expense reporting, like travel expenses. 

Our CEO uses his physical Ottimate Card to book flights and get rental cars. He travels a lot, and we don’t have anyone centrally doing that. So he just uses the Card himself.

Results with Ottimate 

With Ottimate, Clutch Coffee has all of its AP and expense management housed in a centralized system. Ottimate handles everything from receiving invoices and getting them approved to making vendor payments and acting as a petty cash replacement. 

As a result, Clutch Coffee has:

• Routed more than 90 percent of their corporate spend through one integrated spend management platform
• Earned more than $5,000 in cash back in just six months
• Grown to 13 locations without needing a dedicated AP manager

And – most importantly — Jake has been able to achieve the kind of lean growth he had envisioned for Clutch Coffee.

That’s the beauty of this system: we don’t need people focused on paperwork and manually tracking financial data. We want our people to be focused on serving our customers. With Ottimate — and especially with The Ottimate Card — we have a solution that allows us to accomplish the vast majority of those processes without committing human capital. So I’m very happy that we’re keeping that all in-house in a way that doesn’t cost our people all their time. It’s fantastic.

Ready to kick your expense management process up a notch? Learn how you can benefit from The Ottimate Card by scheduling a demo today!