Plate IQ vs. Spendesk

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".

Spendesk's integration with Slack is super functional, as I receive requests to approve expenses daily. This way, we can act on time. This also works with pending approvals from other stakeholders. Also, keeping tracking of the POs thresholds is quite handy. On the other hand, sometimes I struggle when I want to access historical data quickly. It would be amazing to get a dashboard.

Incentivized

• OCR
• Workflow
• Support

Incentivized

• POs approval
• Integration with Slack

Incentivized

• 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

• The AI that reads receipts could be improved.

Incentivized

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

Spendesk is fully dedicated to this field. While we are still using Airtable for other purposes, such as automation, Spendesk allows us to get a well-structured process for approvals and improve the communication between different teams

Incentivized

• 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.

• Reduce the approval time of expenses
• Improve the communication between departments

Incentivized