Ottimate vs. Shoeboxed

It is well targeted at restaurants and similar service organizations with complex COGS. It dovetails well with complementary systems like FinTech payments. It wasn't designed by accountants, so there is a bit of roughness. Reporting is very limited: would like to see some SQL / build your own report functionality. Lookups are reasonably robust (filter for amount, time, vendor, etc). It is occasionally unstable but recovers gracefully. From our use case, it would be preferable to have the user approving the invoice ALSO have the ability to attach documents. This is left to the payment approver, who in our case is the "check signer".

I'm not sure how Shoeboxed can be used in a large organization, but for our small business, it is perfect. I'm the only one who deals with our finances and works with our accountant and for that Shoeboxed is simply my lifesaver and worth so much more for not just all the time it saves me but all the worries and headaches too.

• OCR
• Workflow
• Support

Incentivized

• Hassle free ways to submit (mobile, snail mail, etc.) with virtually no workload for us
• Digitalizing business cards to facilitate contact management
• Categorizing of receipts to make them searchable

• Provide better analytics in terms of cost increases per item.
• Provide the ability to create recipes and forward price increases to those recipes for accurate food cost projections.
• Free Bill Pay

• I had some issues with the mobile app in the past - where it crashes or gets stuck uploading. I think they fixed most of that, however, I transitioned to simply mailing my documents off to them.

They have a dedicated support person for each customer who actually knows the product.

Turnaround is usually within an hour or faster.

We used DocuWare first; great experience; however, it was not made specifically for restaurant clients like Plate IQ is. Plate IQ does a much better job of recognizing common items, and they've continued to add a function that is important for restaurant owners. Restaurant 365, we felt, was trying to be a complete package of accounting/AP/AR/inventory. After looking at each piece, we didn't feel that each of them was as strong as the other.

Incentivized

We felt we got more customized support through Shoeboxed and pricing was competitive.

• In my opinion, it has had zero impact on ROI now that we are paying for an additional year.
• Another negative is that we've spent a lot of time discussing this issue with Plate IQ, to no avail. They feel it's appropriate to charge a company for an entire year of service even though said company emailed to cancel prior to the end of the first year of service.
• We also wasted a lot of time onboarding this company only to find out that the software left a lot to be desired.

• It saves me, I would say, at least 2-3 hours each week
• We probably generate 'better' tax returns - more deductions and save on our accountant in the process, since they have everything perfectly prepped