Based in Charleston, South Carolina, OneDataSource began vetting vendors to be their OCR engine integrated with onePAY. Their comprehensive search started mid-2015 where they interviewed and demoed software from about 20 companies over a 6-month period. The OneDataSource team identified their requirements and narrowed it down to 3 vendors, ultimately selecting Ephesoft after running its community version to test it.

“We wanted a solution that could run on Linux, used Regular Expressions (RegEx), used tables for OCR processing and could export the captured data,” explained Bruce Belvin, President of OneDataSource. “Ephesoft met all of our key requirements, whereas other vendors could not, so it was an easy decision.”

Belvin described how restaurant franchisees are often challenged with paper invoices and processing, and many of them – even ones with more than 50 locations – are still doing manual data entry. Many times, restaurants receive one invoice, and then the accounting staff must manually allocate a percent of the payment to each location – creating higher labor and supplies costs using paper, envelopes and stamps. The onePAY team helps their clients to calculate labor savings, cost per invoice and looks at how to improve their business processes.

QSR customers also face issues of visibility into their cash requirements, as well as auditing and tracking their data. Other challenges include storage costs. Often, an individual franchise location has a storage unit that houses their records and invoices, so through automation, these processes can reduce monthly storage fees, paper costs and other manual processes. OneDataSource’s goal with onePAY is to create paperless, touch-free business processes for their customers.As a response to these outdated processes, OneDataSource built onePAY, a workflow automation tool, which has a patent pending. onePAY combines Ephesoft’s world-class image capture capabilities with a Business Rules Engine that allows the onePAY to develop and apply customized business rules for coding, auto approval and routing based on a client’s specific needs. onePAY is used for processing accounts payable data and invoices, and uses Ephesoft’s patented advanced document capture platform on the front end to ingest, classify and extract invoices. On average, most QSR customers process between 25 to 30 invoices per location per month. Some of the bigger food suppliers have already implemented touchless invoices that the bigger national brands use, which helps to cut down the invoicing processing.

OneDataSource’s customers have cited many benefits and advantages after they implemented onePAY with Ephesoft. Here’s what some of their customers reported:

• Within the first 12 months of launching onePay with Ephesoft, OneDataSource onboarded over 2,000 customer QSR locations.
  After stopping to mail out invoices, one QSR brand with 50 locations reported saving $1,500 per month.
• Multiple customers report that on average one AP staff supports about 50 to 80 restaurants. After implementation, that one person can support approximately 400 restaurants. This supports a scalable growth model.
• Within the QSR industry, more investment and private equity firms are buying up franchises. With an influx of funding, they are often expanding their investments from 50 locations to 150 locations in several years. The onePAY model supports this rapid scaling and growth quickly and easily.
• One of OneDataSource’s largest customers with about 750 locations went from an AP department of 9 clerical processors with an average of 80 stores per processor to now only 3 clerical staff and one manager, with each processor capable of supporting 300 or more stores. In addition, they reassigned tenured staff to vendor management activities that include compliance and auditing. Savings from auditing are still being calculated, but are predicted to positively impact their bottom line.

“Ephesoft’s intelligent document capture and OCR platform enabled our goals to become a reality. More importantly, their software and machine learning technology enables our customers to work better, faster and smarter. They have been a great partner, especially the Professional Services team,” stated Belvin. OneDataSource continues to add new features and solutions to onePay with a focus on providing the best solutions and service to their customers.

“Ephesoft’s intelligent document capture and OCR platform enabled our goals to become a reality. They have been a great partner, especially the Professional Services team.”

— Bruce Belvin, President of OneDataSource