Customer Story | Restaurant Accounting Firm
How J Ely Saves 530 Hours a Year with Ottimate
“It used to take us 30 seconds to enter a single-item invoice. Longer ones took half an hour. With Ottimate, both invoices take 5 seconds.”
Founding
Invoices/month
Tech
Thomson Reuters
J Ely Business Services is an accounting firm based in Destin, Florida. Founded in 1998 by restaurant accounting veteran Jacqueline Ely, the company serves more than 50 businesses around the country, with a focus on clients in the restaurant and bar industries.
The Challenge
When Jacqueline’s son Joe Ely stepped into a managerial role at J Ely Business Services, he inherited an invoice process in desperate need of streamlining. “We were old-fashioned,” he explains. “There were file cabinets and paper everywhere. Local restaurant operators were driving their invoices to our office.”
Soon, Joe began using document management software Docuware to digitize the invoices, but it wasn’t providing enough visibility. “The software would read header information, but it couldn’t piece out the line items. To get the data we needed into the GL, we had to enter it all by hand.”
With 72,000 invoices a year coming into the office, the team spent 38,000 minutes a year — over 630 hours — on manual entry. Faced with such a time-consuming and inconvenient process, Joe went looking for an AP solution that could gather line-level data.
The Solution
With Ottimate, the team doesn’t just gather granular data — they use it to control costs. “Now we track whether contracted items are being charged right, and whether different locations are paying different prices for the same thing,” says Joe.
According to Joe, the digitization process is also easier. “The managers love being able to shoot an upside down, backwards, three-page invoice, mixed in with a bunch of other invoices, and have it process properly.”
And the approval process has eliminated client trips into the office entirely. “Our aging is exact to what’s sitting in Ottimate under the Approvals tab. The manager just logs on, sees what we’ve set for payment, and approves it.”
J Ely’s Results
With Ottimate automatically coding each line item to the appropriate GL code, the J Ely team has saved over 530 hours a year on invoice processing alone. “A one-line invoice used to take us 30 seconds to key in. Now it takes us 5,” says Joe. “But here’s the thing: That 100-item invoice used to take us about half an hour to process. Now, that also takes 5 seconds.”
In addition to processing invoices over 80% faster, Joe can now hire remote workers. “Hiring accountants around here is not easy. But now we can open it up to anyone who has a computer. We can choose who does the work. Ottimate made it easy for us to do that. It saves us a ton of time and work.”
Learn how your business can save time with AP automation by scheduling an Ottimate demo today!