Somebody is still keying invoices by hand

The vendor drops a PDF. Somebody opens it and types the lines into whatever you use for food cost. Item, quantity, price, credit. Then they do the next one, and the next store's.

Do the arithmetic on your own group. Say six invoices a store a week, four minutes each to key and eyeball. Nine stores is about three and a half hours a week, every week, before anybody has looked at a single price.

Those are made-up numbers. Put yours in — invoice count off last month, and time somebody actually doing it rather than guessing. The real one is usually worse than the guess, because nobody counts the second pass after a credit shows up.

Two jobs, and only one of them is typing

The stack hides two different jobs, and they get treated as one.

The first is transcription. Fifty lines, the same shape every week, no judgement required until something is wrong. The second is the check: did the case price move, did we get shorted, does this credit belong to this week or last.

The first job is why somebody is still at it at nine at night. The second job is the one that actually protects your food cost, and it is the one that gets rushed because the first one ate the evening.

Most of what gets pitched at this collapses the two. "Automate accounts payable" sounds like a platform, a migration, and a year. What you have is a folder of PDFs and somebody who knows which rep to call.

What I would actually do

Narrower than the pitch, and probably free.

You do not need a new AP system. You need the PDF to arrive as a list your person can check instead of one they have to retype. Most groups already pay for something that will do that — it is sitting in the accounting tool, or the email suite, or the vendor portal nobody logged into after onboarding. Point it at one invoice. Ask for the vendor, the date, each line, each price, and the credits.

Then check it against the paper, line for line, for the first few weeks.

It will get a pack size wrong. That is the one to watch for, because a wrong pack size does not look wrong — it looks like a price change, and a wrong price in your item file compounds through every theoretical you run after it.

What changes is not that the work disappears. It is that the person who used to spend the evening typing spends twenty minutes checking, and the rest of it on the four lines that actually moved.

Who still owns the call

Nobody's software decides anything here. Draft only, and three hard stops:

• It does not post to your accounting system. A person does.
• It does not change a vendor price in your item file. A person does.
• It does not decide a credit looks about right. That is the whole job.

Write down whose name is on the check — an actual person, not "the office." If the only reason it keeps working is that you keep asking about it, it is not running, it is being carried.

Start with the loudest vendor, not the biggest

Pick the one that sends the most lines, not the one you spend the most with. Frequency is what burns the hours; spend is what you negotiate, and that is a different afternoon.

One vendor, one store, three weeks. If the check is faster than the typing was, roll it to the other stores. If it is not, you have lost three weeks of a small task and learned something true about your invoices, which is that they are messier than anyone admits.

And genuinely: open what you already pay for first. Finding the feature you are already buying is a better afternoon than a demo call.

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If you are not sure this is your biggest leak, take the free check. Eight questions, no email, and it will tell you where your managers' hours are actually going — including when the answer is that invoices are fine and something else is eating the week.