Digital Restaurant Invoices Have Arrived!

If you are still manually reviewing that stack of invoices at the end of each month, you’re probably not catching cost fluctuations until it’s too late. Gone are the days of spending long hours going through each individual line item on your invoices. Innovative technology solutions exist that can assist you with the busy work of reviewing your purchases allowing you to make better business decisions.

When you think of using a software to manage food cost, what are the two boxes that absolutely must be checked?  If you said “easy” and “functional,” then we agree – and you have come to the right place!  Balancing the functionality, you get from your food cost management software and the ease of using it is tricky, when historically the more functionality you get in a software the more difficult it becomes to use.  That difficulty is usually tied up in manual data entry and general maintenance on the software required for it to function as intended. So, when we say you don’t need to spend more than 2-3 minutes a day in our software to know your food cost and cost of goods sold every single week, we hold for applause.

Chefs and restaurant owners are looking for technology that is easy to use so they can keep using it. Invoicing software needs to have functionality so operators are getting enough out of it to warrant whatever they are paying for it. Foodbam’s restaurant inventory management system digitizes the entire invoice process, making the process cleaner, quicker, easier and more accurate.

No more printed out invoices and highlighters. No more excel sheets and late nights calculating purchases you made over a month ago – or even last quarter. Foodbam creates digital restaurant invoices and logs the prices you pay for every item and helps you achieve an accurate digital picture of your Cost of Goods Sold – no calculations required! Foodbam does all the work for you.

If You Can Take a Selfie, You Can Get Your Food Costs

Manually entering invoices into a software can be draining, not to mention the potential for clumsy-thumbed mistakes. Finally, a solution! By simply snapping a picture of an invoice directly from our app, the invoice is digitized and all the information it contains is entered into the software automatically!  Data entry is now as easy as Snap, two, three.  Don’t think it can get any easier than that?  Then you’re in for a surprise – with most major broadliners you don’t even need to lift a finger.  All invoices can be electronically routed into the software just hours after the truck leaves to deliver your order!

Foodbam software turns your purchases into a digitized dashboard that includes an overall look at your product descriptions, prices, item codes, pack sizes, units of measure and quantity. Foodbam calculates your food cost more accurately if the software knows what both your pack size is and unit of measure and doesn’t get confused by trying to read it out of the description like other systems might.

Digital Restaurant Invoices: Organizing Restaurant Purchase Data Has Never Been Easier

What happens in the background when you snap the picture of your restaurant invoice? All the ingredients are first categorized; the software applies categories of ingredients to remove non-food items from food cost reporting automatically, linking them to the appropriate GL Code to be loaded directly into your accounting system.

Ingredients are also cataloged, which basically means functionally identical products are grouped together automatically. For example, if you typically buy Bacon A but your distributor had to substitute it for Bacon B due to out of stock, you would treat those two bacons as the same ingredient.  Your software should too! Foodbam intuitively groups like products together so you don’t have to and cleans up the names and descriptions to be easier on the eyes!

Cataloging is important because other systems out there will make you manually teach them where to put every new ingredient, such as bacon, every time a new ingredient is introduced.  Limiting manual work and maintenance to the software ensures your business’s profitability is never held back by the number of hours in your day.

It’s not only about uploading the information, you also need to clean up the data too to make it easier to read for a chef who may not have the time to break down a line item to what it actually is for the sake of inventory or a recipe. Think of this process as creating a digital filing cabinet with all of the invoices that flow through your restaurant. Everything from food and supplies to a cable bill or landscaping service, Foodbam integrates with your existing accounting system and provides a holistic representation of your restaurant’s expenses.

Ready to start receiving a clearer picture of ingredient prices? Ready to handover the invoice process and let someone else do the hard work for once? If you answered yes, then request a demo today!