Invoice approval & bill pay

From the invoice arriving to the money leaving your account.

Vendor invoices come in, get coded to the right cost category, route to whoever approves them, and get paid — one connected workflow instead of multiple disconnected ones.

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A week of invoices, mostly already handled.

The back office measured the way it actually runs: how much arrived, and how much needs review.

Invoices received

47

this week

Coded automatically

44

no manual entry

Flagged for review

3

first time DishBooks has seen them

Awaiting approval

6

routed to their approver

Scheduled to pay

12

in the next payment run

Vendors connected

invoices arrive automatically

One workflow, end to end

It lands in the books on its own.

An approved invoice flows into your books and meets the matching bank transaction at reconciliation, instead of being re-keyed at month-end.

Pay vendors by check, directly from DishBooks.

Bill Pay closes the loop, so the payment happens in the same place as the approval and the books — it's an optional add-on.

Approval routing instead of a paper pile.

Invoices route to whoever signs off on them with the coding already done, so approving is a decision about the spend rather than an afternoon of data entry.

Coded to the cost category, not just an expense account.

A case of chicken wings maps to Poultry, a shred of mozzarella to Dairy. That line-level coding is what makes prime cost by category possible downstream.

Every other vendor, treated exactly the same.

Invoices from any vendor without a direct connection are uploaded and run through the same AI-assisted coding — there's no second-class path for the small local supplier.

Major distributors connect directly.

DishBooks supports vendor connections, so their invoices arrive on their own rather than being collected off a clipboard or out of an inbox.

The invoice is where restaurant cost data actually comes from.

Many of the numbers an operator cares about — prime cost, COGS by category, which protein moved this week — trace back to vendor invoices. When invoices are keyed in by hand, that data arrives late, arrives inconsistently, or arrives blended into a single food-cost line that hides what actually happened.

DishBooks reads invoices as they arrive and codes them line by line. New items are flagged the first time they appear; map one once and it's remembered permanently, so the system gets quieter the longer you use it. The approval step then sits on top of clean, already-coded data rather than being the place where the coding gets done.

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The workflow

Four steps, and you only touch two of them.

Arriving and coding happen without you. Approving and paying are decisions, so they stay yours.

Connected distributors send invoices directly. Everything else is uploaded — no vendor is left out of the workflow.

Arrives

AI-assisted coding maps each line to the right cost category, and flags any item it hasn't seen before rather than guessing.

Coded

Routed to whoever signs off, with the coding already done — so approval is a judgement about the spend, not data entry.

Approved

Pay by check directly from DishBooks, and the payment is already in the books when the bank transaction arrives.

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Understand what needs attention in seconds

What changes when invoices stop being data entry

The invoice is the raw material for every cost number you care about.

Save time on manually keying invoices.
Approve based on the coding instead of doing the coding first.
Catch a vendor price increase in the week it lands, not at month-end.
Keep approval, payment, and the books in one place instead of three.
Map a new item once instead of recognizing it every time.
Walk into month-end with the invoices already in the books.