Achieve Better Inventory-to-AP Workflow with Ottimate and COGS-Well
by Ottimate Partner
From our partners at
Hear from real users how COGS-Well and Ottimate work better together for their restaurants.
The Ideal Scenario for Restaurant AP
Wouldn’t it be great if automating your accounts payable (AP) and inventory control processes was as easy as scanning invoices?
With the pairing of best-in-class solutions like Ottimate and COGS-Well, it can be.
When it comes to processing invoices, updating accounts payable, reconciling statements, automating payments, controlling inventory, managing recipes, and analyzing food costs, simply scan your invoices and let our intelligent systems do the rest.
COGS-Well (fitly named for cost-of-goods-sold) is one of Ottimate’s preferred inventory partners offering restaurants easy recipe management and more alongside a seamless integration with Ottimate’s first-class AP automation solution designed for every member of your team.
Invoice Automation
It all starts with invoice automation. Invoice automation eliminates the need to manually sorting, recording, or mailing invoices. First, you’ll scan and upload your invoices to Ottimate. Thanks to Ottimate’s powerful AI technology, images are automatically converted into digital data and then easily exported to your accounting and inventory management system.
This integration eliminates the manual entry or coding of invoices that can slow you down. The expenses will already be mapped to your general ledger accounts — saving you substantial time and increasing accuracy.
Ottimate not only automates AP, but also allows us to keep excellent records of invoices and to monitor everything coming into our restaurants. We constantly refer to both the photos and digital records of invoices that Ottimate stores for us when we need to troubleshoot all sorts of issues that come up. We also use it regularly to identify when we may be missing invoices from vendors.
Noah Kopito
Director of Operations, Mamahuhu Restaurants
The biggest benefit from Ottimate has been the ease of operating across locations. We have six locations and being able to quickly run full-company reporting or see vendor/item spending trends across the company is very valuable. The user interface is easy and my GMs check purchasing data on the Spend Analysis tool each week to get an estimate of where their profitability (and thus, bonus) will land for a given period.
Kyle Zuvella
CFO, Lure Fish House
Payment Automation
Payment automation is another benefit of a fully automated accounts payable process — and Ottimate’s VendorPay solution makes payments a snap.
You can pay any invoice, issued by any vendor, from any device, all from your Ottimate dashboard With VendorPay, you can consolidate the payment process and eliminate time-consuming and costly steps like printing or mailing checks.
Check runs used to be my coworker and I reading off numbers and vendors for 30 minutes. Now we use Ottimate for almost all of our bill payments. It’s a lot easier because we don’t have to coordinate our schedules. I do the bulk of the payments, she can do others, and we meet up for five minutes to take care of the rest.
Sarah Young
AP & Inventory Specialist
Inventory Control
The process doesn’t end there. After you’ve scanned your invoices, Ottimate captures the inventory item detail, converts it into digital data, and then seamlessly exports this information into your COGS-Well system.
COGS-Well then uses this data to automatically create your inventory item database and continually track what items you’re buying, from what vendors, in what quantities, and at what prices.
I was immediately attracted to COGS-Well because they could use Ottimate’s integration to capture our invoice history and create our starting inventory database. They provided an opportunity for us to convert a 9 to 12 month implementation process into a few days.
Jennifer Beougher
CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group
Before COGS-Well, invoices with the line item detail were being entered manually by our managers. COGS-Well’s integration with Ottimate is providing enormous time savings. Our managers are no longer spending several hours per week behind their keyboards entering invoices.
Rich Ortiz
Director of Finance, Buzz Hospitality
To make things easy, COGS-Well uses a combination of unique technology and human auditors to update and manage your inventory item database for you. COGS-Well’s inventory control also has features for counting and valuing the inventory on hand, ordering, transfers, and commissary management.
Our inventory spreadsheets were only updated periodically, and the process took a lot of time. Inventory counts used to take a full week every month. Now with COGS-Well, it is only a few hours per month.
Cooper Thurber
PIER 22 Restaurant
Recipe Management
You can also create, cost, and model pricing or ingredients for menu items in COGS-Well. Your sales mix is imported each day from your Point-of-Sale system, providing you with valuable insights, like theoretical versus actual inventory cost and usage analysis. You can also use menu analytics to evaluate your menu items for popularity and profitability.
Better understanding the components of our food cost has been a big benefit of using COGS-Well. How much is inflation, how much is waste, and how much is the sales mix? We had no way of getting at this data before. With COGS-Well’s menu modeling tools comes the power of making better decisions about our menu.
Jennifer Beougher
CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group
The integrations between COGS-Well and Ottimate help us identify cost-related issues more proactively. For example, the invoice details being uploaded automatically – with minimal errors – has allowed us to use the COGS-Well dashboard to proactively recognize when a menu item has gotten more costly. In the seafood industry, costs jump around quite a bit, so this helps us protect profits and not be too slow to recognize an issue. It’s been a big benefit to us in that regard.
Kyle Zuvella
CFO, Lure Fish House
A Winning Combo: End-to-End Accounts Payable & Inventory Automation
By combining the power and ease of Ottimate’s AP automation software and COGS-Well’s revolutionary inventory and recipe management system, processing and analyzing vendor invoices couldn’t be easier. The results speak for themselves: You’ll enjoy a fully automated accounts payable and inventory control process that saves time, increases control, and improves accuracy.
When we found Ottimate, it was a game changer. We use Ottimate and COGS-Well together and that took us to an even greater level of analysis, allowing us to automate manual processes and keep our fingers on the pulse of cost control.
Will Strong
Senior Advisor, Cherry Lane Ventures
We have had a lot of success using the two tools together, as they provide a truly end-to-end solution for managing all aspects of our operations COGS. This starts in the kitchen with Ottimate’s invoice scanning app, and ends in COGS-Well on the Actual COGS report which tells us our food cost – one of the most important measures of our operation’s performance.
Noah Kopito
Director of Operations, Mamahuhu Restaurants
Ready to revolutionize your operations? Learn More about COGS-Well’s inventory and recipe management solutions.
Want to leverage the power of AP automation? Schedule an Ottimate demo today!
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