3Sheets Restaurants Cut Costs & Boost Efficiency with AP Automation
Family-owned restauranteurs 3Sheets Restaurants operates two venues in Western Australia. Customers know the business for its unique character, great food and drink, and relaxed, family atmosphere. Offering an assortment of high-quality produce, the company continuously strives to improve its customer experience through mouth-watering dishes, popular beverages and unbeatable customer service.
Lightyear, a solution for Xero AP automation, was recommended to the team when they began experiencing challenges around ordering stock and increased workload during seasonal fluctuations.
About 3Sheets Restaurants
Pippa Evans, Group Area Manager, has been handling the AP automation process for 3Sheets Restaurants. Since joining the business, she has helped implement the Lightyear solution, bringing automation into the mix to improve operational processes.
The 3Sheets operation has two incredibly successful venues, servicing Western Australian clientele. Its popularity continues to grow amongst families and young people with its highly sought-after locations and excellent food and drink.
The business gets busier during summer and Christmas, so the finance team has to handle more orders and invoices. Paired with the need to match invoices to delivery notes and supplier statements leaves the team extremely stretched.
An Overcooked Finance Team Burnt Out by Manual Tasks
Managing a high volume of produce across two venues proved challenging for the 2-person finance team and resulted in excessive manual work.
"We had to use couriers to transport all delivery notes and invoices from our venues to the accounts team," explains Pippa. "Which involved quite a lot of manual handling.”
The team were under increasing pressure to enter invoice data into their POS system manually. The finance department struggled to keep up with the high volume of stock, especially during busy seasons. The team became bogged down in tedious manual tasks significantly impacting the department's efficiency.
"I would have manually entered our invoices through our POS system which took around 6 hours a week. I wouldn’t have even entered most of our food invoices. Our accountants spent approximately 5 hours a week manually checking invoices against delivery notes and statements.”
Serving Up Success With AP Automation for Xero
Pippa and her team are enjoying the AP automation that Lightyear has brought.
"I think the workflow is really well laid out, making it super easy for new staff to pick up.”
The team are now benefiting from automated statement reconciliation and detailed reporting which has helped in making strategic decisions for the group.
"The reporting has been great because it is so versatile. I can pretty much get any information I am looking for with a couple of clicks.”
Pippa highlights the benefits of tracking price fluctuations of products:
"The price-checking feature is amazing. It means we can easily identify when we have been overcharged or received the wrong inventory and in turn, organise a credit note.”
Line item data extraction which integrates with Xero, enables detailed reporting for hospitality businesses like 3Sheets to understand customer behaviours and purchasing trends. Creating reports that highlight which products customers purchase more often helps build a popular offering with customers. Identifying when demand is highest and lowest helps with ordering to avoid waste and save money.
Talking about the onboarding process at Lightyear, Pippa emphasised that she was very impressed with the customer relations staff who originally onboarded the team with plenty of training sessions.
"It was pretty much seamless, our main concern was getting suppliers to email the invoices consistently and promptly which were all resolved. The ongoing support is extremely quick to respond to any questions through the online chat facility."
The Perfect Recipe for Savings
Since implementing Lightyear’s AP automation software, 3Sheets has reduced manual processing by over 80% each month. Pippa used to spend 24 hours a month on invoices, but now only spends 4 hours thanks to AP automation.
"Our accountants now spend around 2-3 hours reconciling invoices depending on the time of the month.” This has saved them between 8 and 12 hours every month.
Now Pippa and her team have more time to complete strategic tasks for the business. The team can analyse data to make informed decisions about customer offerings, suppliers, new locations, or investments.
"We have much better visibility of costs across the team. We also find that the team are much better at organising credit notes for any missing or wrong products supplied.”
This is a huge cost-saving for the business that now only pays for the items ordered and received.
"We have saved time and money on our couriers and from the storage of paper invoices.”
With Lightyear, you can store documents online for up to 8 years in the Archive section. Users can report on all historical documents stored in the system.
When asked what advice Pippa would give to other hospitality businesses using Xero looking to automate their AP processes, she said:
"I would say it isn’t as overwhelming as it may feel when you start looking into it. After a couple of months, you won’t believe you did it any other way! We now have so much more time to focus on other business areas.”
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