How a Restaurant Chain Cut Invoice Processing Time by 90% Through Smart Automation
Industry: Restaurants
Service: Invoice Automation
Client Background
The client is a fast-expanding restaurant chain in the USA running 22 dine-in and takeaway outlets. Each location receives daily deliveries from food distributors, produce suppliers, beverage vendors and cleaning supply partners. Their finance team handled more than 1,200 invoices every month, many handwritten and formatted inconsistently.
As the chain expanded, manual data entry and delayed approvals led to payment inconsistencies, supplier issues, and limited visibility into store-level spending. They needed a centralised, automated system to manage food and supply invoices efficiently.
Challenges
- High volume of paper-based invoices – Most invoices arrived as physical copies or PDF attachments, requiring manual typing and verification.
- Duplicate and missing entries – Inconsistent submission across locations led to duplicate entries or missing invoices in the accounting system.
- Delayed approvals – Store managers often forwarded invoices late, resulting in delayed payments and strained vendor relationships.
- Inconsistent pricing and overcharges – Manual checks made it difficult to catch pricing errors, mismatched quantities or missed discounts.
- Lack of spend visibility – The finance team lacked a single view of food, beverage and supply costs across all locations.
How Did APS Help?
- Automated invoice capture – OCR-powered automation converted paper invoices, PDFs and email attachments into clean, structured data ready for processing.
- Centralised invoice routing – All invoices from every location were routed into one cloud platform where managers could review, approve, or flag items instantly.
- Smart price and quantity validation – Automated checks compared invoice details with contracted rates and expected quantities, identifying:
• Overcharges
• Incorrect pricing
• Missed or incorrect discounts
• Unauthorised supply orders - Approval workflow automation – APS designed a rule-based workflow that assigned invoices to the correct approvers based on vendor, category, store and invoice amount.
- Integrated reporting dashboard – A unified dashboard provided real-time insights into:
•Store-wise spending
•Vendor-wise costs
•Category-level consumption
•Monthly and quarterly trends
Results Achieved
- 90% reduction in manual invoice entry (from 1,200 invoices monthly to just 120 manually reviewed).
- Approval turnaround improved from 5 days to under 24 hours.
- 80% drop in pricing discrepancies through automated validation.
- 98% on-time vendor payments, improving supplier relationships.
- Complete store-level visibility, improving financial control and budgeting accuracy.
As a result, the firm gained:
- Digitised and centralised invoice processing across all 22 locations.
- Lower workload for managers and AP staff.
- Stronger vendor relationships with consistent, timely payments.
- More accurate cost tracking for smarter purchasing decisions.
- A scalable automation framework ready for new store openings.
APS transformed a slow, error-prone invoice process into an automated, accurate and scalable system that supports the restaurant’s growth while strengthening financial control across all locations.