You’ve heard the term Accounts Payable a thousand times, maybe even a million. It’s probably instilled in your mind and has become second nature at this point. Or maybe it hasn’t.
Either way, it’s okay. We’re here to give you the 411 on everything you need to know in relation to Accounts Payable.
Accounts Payable is the money due to vendors or suppliers for goods or services received. In short, it is money that has not been paid yet.
Accounts Payable could be anything from ingredients and disposables to your lease and licenses you need to operate your restaurant.
For restaurant operators, this process can be laborious, frustrating, and unreliable. Accounting itself is already stressful. When you’re a fast-paced restaurant, you have invoices coming in almost every day. It’s hard to keep up with every single order you receive… and having to count and process it all too?! Forget about it. Nobody has the time for that, especially in 2022.
Keeping Track of Numbers
When running a restaurant, it’s important to keep your numbers accurate and consistent. Whether it’s your food costs, cost of goods sold, or inventory—you never want to see errors.
Although, when you’re making multiple orders every week, you’re bound to come across vendor payment issues every so often. This ranges from delays to late fees, increased operational costs, or even strained relationships between you and your vendors. Nobody wants to experience this, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s inevitable.
You want to make sure you’re keeping track of your payment schedule as soon as you receive an invoice. The best way to do this is to keep track of inventory in a timely, organized manner. It’s easy to misplace files when you have hundreds coming in regularly. This is where technology comes in.
It’s important to upload your inventory somewhere that is easily accessible and effortlessly manageable. We recommend utilizing technology such as Food Cost Management because it becomes easier to manage food costs and reduce food waste.
This also means monitoring your cash flow and sales. You have to keep track of your revenue consistently in order to make sure you’re hitting the margins you need to succeed as a restaurant operator. When you’re calculating all of this by hand (the traditional way), it leaves room for lots of mistakes and miscounts.
When a majority of your restaurant operates through an online system, whether it’s takeout orders or POS, it’s evident that paying the bills for your restaurant should be paid the same way. I mean, it’s rare when someone is walking around with a check book these days. Making the switch to technology for your Accounts Payable is crucial to saving time and making accurate payments on time.
Manage Your Accounts Payable with Technology
Do you really have time to write checks, stuff envelopes, and mail them out when you have a handful of other things take care of? Time is valuable now more than ever. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one less thing to worry about? BillPay is a great solution to modernizing your Accounts Payable.
By implementing technology into this process, you can put time back into your day and save money. When using BillPay, you can see all of your bills, choose when to schedule them out, and the status of each payment, all in one centralized location.
This also means you can pay your bills from anywhere at any time—whether you’re away on a beach somewhere or lying in bed enjoying a glass of wine, it’s available to you at all hours, right from your fingertips.
Online transactions are secure and safe to use, and they prevent you from any fraud. You can monitor each of your payments to see when they have arrived and been processed. No more scrambling through tracking codes from the Post Office and waiting over the phone for hours to check the status of your payment. It’s updated in real-time when done online.
There’s no better feeling than taking control over your accounting. It’s a tedious process but making use out of technology makes it a lot easier.
If you pay all of your personal bills online—mortgage, phone, utilities, then why not your restaurant bills too? It’s 2022, embrace technology. It’s here to help.
How to Get Started
Here at Dining Alliance, we make things easier for our operators. If you’re a Dining Alliance member, you can now take advantage of our new Food Cost Management technology, as well as our Bill Pay to help you get on track with all of your accounting needs. Login to your myDA portal to get started!
If you’re new to Dining Alliance, become a member today and embrace these solutions that help run your restaurant operation more efficiently. You’ll also have access to exclusive savings and discounts on items you buy every day. Join today!