“Paperwork is a nightmare,” begins Bo Davis, Co-Founder and CEO, MarginEdge. A restaurant owner for 15 years with a strong technological background, Davis struggled with managing manual invoice processes, inventories, and unending administrative tasks. A deep understanding of the restaurateurs’ operational pain points and a strong will to conquer these challenges prompted Davis to establish MarginEdge in 2015. “I co-founded MarginEdge with an aim to make the life of restaurateurs easy. As a company, we inject efficiency into restaurants, whether independents or chains, by digitizing their manual paperwork using modern technology.” The company offers restaurant owners an easy-to-use, seamless cloud-based platform to process their invoices digitally plus integrate with their POS system to bring paperless efficiency to their back-of-house operations. The platform’s data capture plus full inventory, recipes, budgeting and cost reporting capabilities guaranty a strong value proposition.

The company provides a mobile application to upload all purchases and receipts, whether for food, supplies, liquor or even gas bills and other utilities. All a restaurateur has to do is take pictures of all the invoices and receipts using their mobile phone.

The MarginEdge platform converts these invoice images into line item details within 24 hours. This information enables restaurateurs to keep track of costs while having control over P&L, budgets, inventories, and orders sent to vendors. The platform easily connects with a restaurant’s POS in real time to gather all sales data. With insights into rich data, they can intelligently set prices for recipes and see plate margins as they move. The platform also provides real-time updating of inventory pricing as well as budgets for food, beverage, liquor or even supplies and R&M categories. Further, all of the data– both invoice data and POS sales data - is automatically transferred to the restaurateur’s accounting system. Integration with the accounting system allows a restaurateur to pay their bills easily and instantly in the platform.

The major differentiator for MarginEdge is its ability to digitally empower the restaurant community while reducing overhead and administrative work. The client onboarding process begins with an easy connection to each client’s existing systems. The procedure gets completed in a matter of days. MarginEdge neither charges clients for the setup nor forces clients to sign up for any long-term contract. Agile and nimble, the platform allows restaurateurs to see the ROI very early. Clients can better focus on their core competencies as MarginEdge provides them a secure platform to reduce the time spent on paperwork.

MarginEdge’s operational excellence reflects in the client success stories. For instance, The Old Ebbitt Grill – 5th largest restaurant in the country – wanted to maintain consistent quality in food preparation, train line cooks, create recipes, and track costs. By leveraging the power of MarginEdge’s platform, the restaurant streamlined its back-end operations (cost tracking, POS reporting, digital inventory management, centralized ordering, and automated invoice processing). MarginEdge made it easy for the restaurant to navigate, search, and share ingredients, procedures, and food preparation pictures across locations through the platform’s innovative kitchen display feature. This feature allows easy kitchen use of recipes and real-time recipe updates across all locations. With MarginEdge and the recipe kitchen display, Old Ebbitt achieved stronger collaboration between line cooks during the food preparation process. Greater control over food prep quality resulted in better consistency of the operations and the actual food served.

MarginEdge has offices in Washington, D.C., Arizona, and New York, and already serves over 700 restaurants in 35 states. MarginEdge is now planning to extend its physical footprint while continuing to reach clients throughout the U.S. In order to further streamline back-office operations and bring even more efficiency gains to its clients, MarginEdge continues to add innovative features that will undoubtedly help ensure it remains the fastest growing platform of its kind.