Many restaurants, particularly those that are small- and medium-sized, still deal with old fashioned paper invoices from their various food suppliers. This can lead to major hassles and headaches when it comes to managing their budgets, planning their menus, and processing their finances.

Plate IQ is a startup in our current class that has created a software platform that lets restaurants store and manage all their invoices and bills in the cloud, and monitor their P&L — down to the plate cost of every dish in their menu — in realtime.

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas wrote about Plate IQ in a story published this past week:

“Restaurants typically manually input information from these invoices
into their accounting software, say Plate IQ co-founders Bhavuk Kaul and
Ram Jayaraman — a tedious and time-consuming process. And even once
they have the data in Quickbooks or their own cost management Excel
spreadsheet, gleaning business intelligence from it takes even more time
and effort.

The scope of the problem came to Kaul’s attention after he took
another startup idea he was working on to show to a restaurant — and
they redirected his attention to the ‘huge problem’ they had dealing
with paper invoices.

…Plate IQ is speeding up invoice data capture by applying optical
character recognition tech in a way that allows restaurant managers to
snap photos of invoices on their phones (using its app) to automatically
pull data into a cost management cloud dashboard. Plate IQ’s software
turns this raw input into structured data so various queries can be run
by the users.”

Read the full story in TechCrunch here.