How FIXE Revolutionizes Restaurant Accounting with Ottimate

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FIXE is a forward-thinking bookkeeping firm dedicated to revolutionizing the accounting processes for restaurants through first-class technology. 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.

From crafting the perfect menu to serving up incredible guest experiences, running a restaurant can be a challenging endeavor. And on top of juggling what’s happening in the dining room or the kitchen, there’s also the hustle and bustle of back-of-house operations to consider — particularly when it comes to financial management. 

While many restaurants rely on manual processes to handle invoices, pay vendors, and track income and expenses, FIXE has teamed up with Ottimate to pave the way for a more efficient process.

FIXE: A Solution Born from Industry Experience

Born out of a passion for improving restaurants’ financial health and operational efficiency, FIXE was founded with a clear vision: to revolutionize bookkeeping for restaurants by integrating advanced technology. 

As FIXE’s Co-Founder and CEO, Ryan Handel, explains: “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.” 

FIXE provides comprehensive, accurate, and timely bookkeeping services tailored specifically for restaurants. By focusing on this niche, FIXE has not only grown its understanding of the industry’s pain points and needs, but has offered its clients streamlined solutions that significantly enhance operational efficiency and financial clarity.

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.

The Challenge: Tackling the Unique Obstacles in Restaurant Accounting 

As a restaurant owner himself, Ryan recognized the inefficiencies of traditional bookkeeping methods. The cumbersome process of managing invoices through back-and-forth emails with bookkeepers was time-consuming and error-prone. Ryan wanted more control and transparency in the AP process, which was hard to achieve with conventional bookkeeping solutions.

“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,” he shares. 

That’s why he and his FIXE co-founders envisioned a more streamlined approach to accounting — one that could handle the specific needs of restaurants. To do this, they knew they needed technology that would help them overcome several key AP challenges, including:

• Inefficient and time-consuming invoice processing

• Lack of control over AP management

• Difficulty in handling high transaction volumes

• Inconsistent and delayed reporting

• Integration issues with existing accounting systems, like QuickBooks

As a leader in restaurant AP automation, Ottimate proved to be the perfect partner for FIXE’s accounts payable needs.

The Solution: Embracing Innovation with the Power of Ottimate

When a former restaurant partner introduced Ryan to Ottimate, he immediately saw the platform’s potential benefits. Ottimate promised to simplify the complex by offering a user-friendly interface that made it easy for both FIXE’s clients and account managers to manage invoices and payments with minimal effort.

“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,” says Ryan. 

“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.”

Several key factors drove FIXE’s decision to choose Ottimate:

• Ease of Use: Ottimate’s intuitive interface allows users to easily select and manage invoices, reducing the need for extensive back-and-forth communication.

• Fast Onboarding: While onboarding with other AP solutions can take several weeks or even months, FIXE can get their clients fully up and running with Ottimate in just one week.

• QuickBooks Integration: Seamless integration with QuickBooks Online makes it easier to manage financial data and generate accurate reports.

• Control and Transparency: Account managers can control the AP process with a single click, enhancing transparency and reducing errors.

• Scalability: Ottimate’s solution can handle a large volume of transactions, making it ideal for a growing firm like FIXE.

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.

FIXE + Ottimate: A Perfect Pairing

Impressed by the efficiency and effectiveness of Ottimate’s solutions, FIXE decided to deepen their relationship by becoming an Ottimate Partner. This partnership has allowed FIXE to integrate Ottimate’s AP automation tools more comprehensively into their service offerings, ensuring their clients have the most robust and reliable accounting package on the market.

Our partnership with FIXE is a prime example of perfect synergy. Our shared dedication to innovation and client-centric solutions fuels our collaboration, empowering restaurants to thrive, unlocking time to focus on the growth and success of their business.

– Sarah Potts, Partner Manager at Ottimate

The Results: Outstanding Outcomes

With Ottimate’s Invoice Automation and VendorPay solutions as part of their core offerings, FIXE gives their restaurant clients a comprehensive package that meets their unique financial needs. 

Doing More with Less

Ottimate’s platform allowed the FIXE team to significantly streamline their AP processes. Account managers — even those with limited bookkeeping experience — can manage a high volume of invoices with ease. 

“A lot of our account managers didn’t have a ton of bookkeeping experience before joining FIXE, and having them come into a system with Ottimate allows them to manage a lot of volume in quick effort and in quick fashion,” explains Ryan. “The ability to manage multiple clients at the same time, manage multiple groups at the same time, and easily audit invoice categorization and those types of things have always been one of the main reasons that we use Ottimate and is one of its biggest benefits for us.”

By reducing the time and tediousness of manual labor, the FIXE team can manage more clients in less time — all without increasing their workload.

Onboarding with Ease

Another standout benefit Ottimate provides is its hassle-free onboarding process. With Ottimate, FIXE can onboard new clients quickly and get their invoices categorized and processed within a week. This fast and efficient setup is a major selling point for clients who have previously experienced long and frustrating onboarding processes with other systems.

According to 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.”

Managing Increased Invoice Volumes

“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,” says 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.

With so many invoices flowing in and out, the FIXE team relies on Ottimate’s ability to make managing this high volume a breeze, so they can focus less on processing invoices and more on maintaining their high standard of service for their clients — all without compromising accuracy or speed.  

Elevating Satisfaction Levels

Ottimate doesn’t just lighten the workload for FIXE’s account managers, it also puts less work on their clients’ plates.

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,” Ryan shares. “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.

This approach speeds up the AP process, minimizes the risk of errors, and gets vendors paid sooner — leading to happier, more satisfied clients.

Working Hand in Hand with QuickBooks

Ottimate’s seamless integration with QuickBooks Online was another game changer for FIXE. The easy interchange between Ottimate and QuickBooks ensures accurate data and timely reporting, a crucial element for restaurant owners who rely on real-time financial information to make informed decisions. 

FIXE-ated on the Future: Ambitious Plans Ahead

Looking ahead, FIXE is not resting on its laurels. The company plans to push its tech-centric approach even further, by creating a comprehensive platform that integrates the tools and solutions they use into a single dashboard. With this platform, they aim to simplify the metrics restaurant owners need most and to deliver key financial updates through text messages and other easily accessible formats.

“We’ve almost finalized our texting platform, where our reports are being delivered through text messages,” Ryan shares. “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 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. ”

Next, FIXE will be designing its own dashboard that aggregates key data from each of its primary platforms into one, easy-to-digest space. 

To spearhead this ambitious project, FIXE recently hired a new CTO, Yogish Pai, who brings a wealth of experience working with comprehensive technology solutions for finance-focused businesses. With his leadership, FIXE aims to deepen its integration with Ottimate and its other core systems, enhancing its service offerings and maintaining its competitive edge in the industry.

As Ryan explains: 

“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 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.”

FIXE’s forward-thinking approach is driven by a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. By focusing on specific solutions and expanding how they can be used to benefit each account, FIXE has poised itself as an indispensable partner to their clients — helping them manage all aspects of their finances seamlessly.

Want to dive deeper into FIXE’s approach to leveraging technology in their accounting operations? Check out Ottimate’s interview with Ryan Handel for more insights, tips, and tricks. 

An Ongoing Journey of Success

FIXE’s partnership with Ottimate has proven to be a resounding success. By leveraging Ottimate’s AP automation solutions, FIXE has enhanced efficiency, improved client satisfaction, and positioned itself for future growth.

FIXE’s journey with Ottimate is a testament to the power of collaboration and the impact of cutting-edge technology in transforming traditional processes. As FIXE continues to innovate and expand its services, the team is well-positioned to set new standards for efficiency and client satisfaction in restaurant accounting.

With our partnership with FIXE, we share a mutual passion for tech-driven innovation to help streamline the accounts payable process for restaurants, freeing up time to focus on the growth and success of their business.

– Sarah Potts, Partner Manager at Ottimate

And with an ambitious plan for the future — built upon the strong foundation of their successful partnership with Ottimate — FIXE’s growth will know no limits, allowing them to help more restaurants achieve financial success and operational excellence.

Ready to transform your AP process? Schedule a demo and learn how Ottimate can help your accounting firm today!