About Haynie & Company

Haynie & Company is a full-service CPA firm headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT. Founded in 1960, the company has grown from a single office to 13 locations with over 400 employees. Meanwhile, it has maintained its small-firm values of teamwork and trust, as well as its commitment to exceeding expectations. Haynie & Company serves businesses of all sizes across a wide range of industries.

Exec summary

Haynie & Company is a Salt Lake City-based firm that provides CPA services to clients across a number of industries. Managing accounts payable for its growing portfolio of restaurant clients requires processing and paying hundreds of monthly invoices, many with dozens of line items. In the past, manually processing these complex invoices required significant staff time.

Today, Haynie & Company has unified invoices and payments in Ottimate. Ottimate automatically captures and codes invoices, then reviews them for approval, with most payments managed through the same platform. Centralizing the AP process has reduced manual work, accelerated invoice processing, increased the team’s capacity to support more work and clients, and provided the company’s restaurant clients with a more accurate, timely picture of their AP standings.

How Haynie & Company managed restaurant AP before Ottimate

A single restaurant can generate hundreds of invoices a month from a large vendor network—manually entering each one, especially produce invoices with hundreds of line items, doesn’t scale.  For a business that oversees accounts payable for several restaurant locations, that volume and complexity add up quickly.

The team at Haynie & Company understands this reality well. 

“Some of these restaurant invoices, such as produce invoices, can have hundreds of line items,” said Juaquin Gutierrez, Accounting Associate at Haynie & Company. 

Before Ottimate, a larger team managed accounts payable for Haynie & Company’s restaurant clients. Manually entering and coding detailed restaurant invoices took significant staff time, especially for invoices with hundreds of line items.

As Haynie & Company added new locations to their portfolio of restaurant clients, this manual work became difficult to manage. The team needed a solution that would reduce manual work, connect invoices and payments, and increase the team’s capacity to support a growing restaurant portfolio.

How Haynie & Company streamlined restaurant AP with Ottimate

To support ongoing growth, Haynie & Company selected Ottimate as its accounts payable automation solution. Today, Ottimate serves as a centralized hub for managing the entire accounts payable lifecycle across over 20 restaurant locations. 

Invoices that arrive via email are uploaded directly into Ottimate. Each line item is then captured and coded.

“We’re not having to sit there and enter everything line by line,” explained Gutierrez.  “Some of these invoices are going to different accounts as well, so the instant capture helps a lot.” 

Once the team enters all invoices, it prepares a weekly AP aging report for each client. The client reviews the report and tells the Haynie & Company team which invoices are approved for payment. Then, the team schedules those payments based on client and vendor preferences. 

“We’ve really enjoyed the fact that Ottimate reaches out and finds the best payment method for every vendor,” said Gutierrez. “Some are paid through virtual cards, some receive checks from Ottimate. It’s nice knowing our vendors are getting paid how they would prefer to be paid.”

Ottimate’s multi-location features make it easier for the team at Haynie & Company to stay organized and manage several restaurant clients from one place. For example, the team can filter a large group of invoices to view only those for a particular client or location. Or, when a client sends approved payments, the team can filter to that specific client instead of searching through invoices across the entire portfolio. 

“I don’t want to be sifting through all of our clients’ invoices to find the right ones to pay,” said Gutierrez. “Being able to change the view of everything is very helpful.” 

The team can also split a single invoice across multiple locations or keep corporate expenses separate from store-level expenses. This helps ensure costs are accurately reflected in the accounting system.

That flexibility extends beyond the platform’s existing features. Gutierrez noted that Ottimate is always willing to work with Haynie & Company to ensure the platform fits their needs and that information flows into its accounting systems correctly.

“They’ve been very helpful,” he said.

Haynie & Company’s results: greater capacity and more time for higher-value work

Since centralizing invoices and payments in Ottimate, the team at Haynie & Company has saved significant time. One place this shows up is invoice intake. Team members no longer spend as much time manually entering and coding long, detailed restaurant invoices. 

The payments process at Haynie & Company has also become more efficient. For some clients, Haynie moved from manually writing and printing checks to selecting invoices in Ottimate, scheduling payments, and letting Ottimate take it from there. 

“We’re not having to sit there packing envelopes and signing checks,” explained Gutierrez. 

With less manual work, the team now has more time to focus on other business priorities. 

“Our team, no matter the size, is more capable of handling more work, whether that be more clients or higher-level operations,” said Gutierrez. “It frees up our team to be more productive in whatever way the firm and our clients need at the moment.” 

Partnering with Ottimate has also had a downstream impact on the restaurant operators Haynie & Company serves. Because the team spends less time on manual work, they have more time to provide clients with the information they need to determine the ideal time to pay every invoice. 

“It makes it easier to give them a more accurate representation of their AP standings,” said Gutierrez. “[Ottimate] makes accounts payable work a lot easier, and it’s very helpful to be able to offer that to our clients.”