The Challenge
When most people think of a family business, they don’t picture a 150-location restaurant empire. But for B&G Food Enterprises — the largest Taco Bell franchisee in Louisiana, with additional locations in Texas and Mississippi — family and growth have gone hand in hand since 1982.
With over 3,000 employees and multiple brands under its umbrella (including KFC and Long John Silver’s), B&G’s accounting team is no stranger to complexity. The Accounts Payable (AP) department, in particular, faced a growing challenge: managing thousands of invoices from hundreds of vendors, all while maintaining precise coding and allocations across multiple franchises.
Danielle Sauce, part of the AP team for over a decade, describes the process: “We processed about 700 invoices a week, and each one passed through our hands five or six times before it was done.” From opening and sorting invoices to manual data entry, approvals, and scanning, every step was time-consuming — and every invoice required meticulous attention to detail.
B&G’s AP team also handled complex location splits and local tax variations across three states. “If we got an invoice for a marketing item sent to multiple stores, each store had different tax rates. We’d use Excel to break it all out, print it, and manually key those numbers into our accounting system,” Sauce recalls.
To make matters more complicated, invoices arrived in different formats: PDFs, postcards, and physical mail — all of which had to be digitized and filed. Even something as routine as tracking down a missing invoice meant searching manually and contacting vendors via email or phone.
The team was under pressure to stay organized and accurate while handling a large and growing workload. Manual processes weren’t just time-consuming — they left little room for strategic work or scaling.
It was clear B&G needed a better solution.
The Solution
After researching invoice automation tools, B&G’s CFO Ellen Pennison chose Ottimate because it can handle invoice detail and approval complexity—two must-haves for a large franchise operation.
Detailed Line-Item Coding
Unlike other solutions, Ottimate could automatically capture header and line-item detail, then assign the correct GL codes to each one — a feature essential to B&G’s AP workflow. “The other companies’ automation wasn’t as detailed as we needed,” says Sauce. “Ottimate did what we wanted.”
Custom Approval Workflows
B&G also replicated its internal invoice routing process within Ottimate using approval rules. “There are some invoices I need to see myself, and others Ellen needs to approve,” Sauce explains. “Ottimate just sends each invoice to the right person — no more walking paper across the office.”
Flexible Upload Options
To handle the range of invoice formats, B&G used multiple input methods: EDI for utility bills, email forwarding for PDF invoices, and Ottimate’s mobile app to snap photos of paper invoices. “We’re about 50/50 paper and digital at this point,” Sauce says. “We just use whatever works best for each location.”
Massive Time Savings
Thanks to Ottimate’s automated transcription and coding, invoice processing time dropped from 60 seconds to just 5 seconds per invoice — a 92% reduction. That adds up to 46 hours saved every month.
“We used to need three people,” Sauce says. “Now we’re doing more with just two.”
Location Splits Made Simple
Ottimate also streamlined B&G’s most tedious task: multi-location invoice splits. Instead of manually entering split data into Excel and re-keying it, B&G now uploads a spreadsheet and lets Ottimate populate all line-item coding.
Sauce notes, “We have some invoices split between 20 stores. Now we just upload the file and it auto-fills the splits. That alone saves us a ton of time.”
Built-In Vendor Communication
With Ottimate’s Vendor Statements feature, tracking down missing invoices is no longer a manual process. “If an invoice is missing, we just click, send a request from inside Ottimate, and the vendor emails it straight in,” Sauce shares.
Smarter Digital Storage
Previously, scanned invoices had to be re-entered into an image storage system. With Ottimate, that process is nearly obsolete. “We’re about 90% of the way to phasing out our old imaging system,” Sauce says. “Now, everything is searchable and stored automatically.”
The Results
With Ottimate, B&G has transformed its AP department into a lean, high-efficiency operation. Manual bottlenecks are gone, visibility is up, and the team can easily handle its growing workload. “It’s significantly reduced the time we spend keying in data,” says Sauce.
For a family business with over 150 locations, Ottimate helps unify AP operations across every franchise — and frees up the AP team to focus on what matters most.
