Invoice Automation for Restaurants
Restaurants have the worst AP volume-to-revenue ratio in small business. A single site takes deliveries from a broadline distributor two or three times a week, produce most days, a beverage supplier weekly, plus linen, waste, gas, grease collection, POS fees and equipment servicing.
Every one of those invoices matters to food cost percentage, which is the number that decides whether the restaurant works. And almost all of them arrive as email attachments or driver-handed paper that gets photographed and emailed.
ZapBooks reads the inbox, extracts the invoices with line items intact, and posts coded bills to QuickBooks Online or Xero so food cost is calculated on current data rather than last month's.
What makes AP hard in restaurants and hospitality
The volume is one problem. The shape of the documents is usually the bigger one.
Delivery frequency, not order size, drives the workload
Three deliveries a week from one distributor is a hundred and fifty invoices a year from a single vendor.
Price creep hides in line items
A distributor raising the case price of chicken by 9% does not send a notice. It shows up in a line item you never read.
Credits and short deliveries
Half the invoices need adjusting for shorts, returns and credits, and the credit note usually arrives days later on a separate email.
Food cost is always retrospective
If invoices post at month end, you learn about a bad food cost month after you can do anything about it.
How it works
- 1
Connect the restaurant's ordering and accounts mailbox
The one distributors and suppliers already send to.
- 2
Invoices extracted with full line detail
Item descriptions, pack sizes, quantities, unit prices and totals, which is what makes price tracking possible at all.
- 3
Credit notes matched to their original invoice
So the net position is right rather than the gross being right and the credit lost.
- 4
Duplicate detection across re-sends
Distributors re-send frequently. Duplicates get caught before they post.
- 5
Coded bills sync to your ledger
Food, beverage, paper, cleaning and service costs split to the accounts your P&L already uses.
Documents it handles
- Broadline food distributor invoices
- Produce and specialty supplier invoices
- Beverage, beer and wine invoices
- Linen, laundry and uniform invoices
- Waste, grease and recycling invoices
- Equipment repair and servicing invoices
What lands in your ledger
- Line-item extraction is the feature that matters here. Header totals cannot tell you that your case price on a staple went up.
- Multi-site operators can run each location's mailbox separately on the Pro plan and post to separate ledgers or tracking categories.
- Credit notes are captured as their own documents and can be matched against the originating invoice before posting.
- Weekly rather than monthly posting is the actual win: food cost percentage becomes a management number rather than a history lesson.
Questions from restaurants and hospitality
Ready to stop typing invoices?
Connect your inbox and your accounting software. ZapBooks reads the invoices, extracts the data and posts coded bills to QuickBooks, Xero or Excel.
14-day free trial. No credit card required.