Automated Bill Pay a Boon for Restaurants

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This article originally appeared on The Green Sheet Online Edition

Compeat Inc., a provider of restaurant software and integrated business management solutions, added Compeat Pay to Compeat Advantage, its restaurant accounting platform. Designed to help restaurant owners and managers reduce costs and improve efficiencies, the automated bill payments solution replaces manual bill systems with a range of automated bill payments options, including check, automated clearing house (ACH) and virtual credit cards, company representatives stated.

“We could not be more thrilled about finding a way to solve one of the restaurant industry’s biggest pain points,” said Jeff Stone, CEO at Compeat. “It has also changed the way that we pay vendors within our own company.”

“Compeat Advantage now has integrated bill payments,” added Clint Blaylock, vice president of payments at Compeat. “We’ve taken stuffing envelopes, buying stamps and other inconveniences of manual bill payment systems off of the restaurant owner’s plate.”

Automated payments options

Blaylock additionally noted that Compeat Pay has no setup, implementation or recurring monthly fees for qualified Compeat Advantage customers. The Compeat Pay solution is fully integrated with customer banks to facilitate secure, accurate and fully automated bill payment processing. He noted the service provides the following features and benefits:

  • Checks: Compeat prints and mails checks on behalf of merchants, using bank information on their checks, leaving existing processes and bank reconciliations unchanged.
  • ACH: Compeat integrates with merchants’ banks, using existing customer accounts to automate creation and delivery of ACH files, without changing current processes or bank reconciliations.
  • Virtual credit card: Compeat issues a pre-approved, one-time use virtual credit card (VCC). Compeatworks directly with merchants’ vendors to accept the VCC and pay bills using the VCC, enabling restaurants to earn rebates based on payment volume.
  • Positive Pay: Positive Pay is an automated fraud detection tool used by most banks to ensure top security by matching each requested check payment against a list of approved payments authorized by the company. While Positive Pay is the best way to deter fraud, creating the list takes time and effort, which causes some operators to procrastinate. Compeat Pay automatically generates the list of approved payments and transfers the list to the bank.”We build the Positive Pay file for our customers and make it easy for them,” Blaylock said. “When our customers realized that we would automate Positive Pay for them, they initiated the process with their banks.”

Save time, enhance security

Blaylock noted that Compeat Pay enhances a client’s current payment flow while leaving existing systems intact. Compeat Advantage, specifically built for restaurants, gives customers control of their operations and bottom line. The solution helps restaurateurs manage every detail of their business, he stated. By integrating inventory, labor, scheduling and bill payments into one single-access platform, CompeatAdvantage is a central hub designed to simplify restaurant management.

Additional benefits include comprehensive audit trails, enhanced security, paperless option with full scanning capability, consolidated reporting options using inter-company capabilities, and convertible purchase order and invoice imports designed to reduce data entry.

“Compeat currently works with an array of leading restaurant industry specialists, including ISOs, ISVs, VARs and third-party service providers,” Blaylock said. “We also offer vendor management solutions to help our sales channel and distribution partners efficiently manage customer-to-vendor communications.

Restaurant365 bridges the gap between accounting and operations by centralizing all data, helping restaurant operators to become more efficient, accurately forecast, and tackle any challenge or opportunity with speed and accuracy.