Bradley Bloch [00:00:00]:

As you grow, you want more controls. You know, you're removed at head office from what's going on on the ground. So you want to make sure that you have an approval process that meets your needs. And if you're a controller, it's called a controller because you want controls in place in a business. Is Factura.ai allows you to do that and allow you to create your own policies, get it customized to your business, and then allow the system to manage that. So, you know, I could go on with million other benefits, but at the highest level, Factura solves four pieces of the puzzle. It's data entry. So automating that data entry, it's managing the workflow, it's the document storage, and then ultimately paying your vendors.

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Bradley Bloch [00:00:38]:

So we can also pay your vendors through Factura.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:42]:

Welcome to Wisking it all with your host, Angelo Esposito, co founder of Wisk AI, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of Wisking it all. We're here today with the CEO of Factura AI, Bradley Block. Bradley, thank you for joining us today.

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Bradley Bloch [00:01:11]:

Angelo, thank you so much for having me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:13]:

Of course, I'm excited. I'm excited to talk about you, about your journey, and a bit about Factura.ai AI. We'll dive deeper, but just to kind of kick things off, can you just tell people and one or two sentences, what is Factura.AI? Yep.

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Bradley Bloch [00:01:27]:

We're AP automation software designed specifically for multi, multi unit businesses, multi location businesses. So we're heavy in the restaurant space. Typically, you would have 20 or more locations where workflows are, you know, more of a necessity. You've got invoices coming to different locations. How do you ensure that the invoice gets picked up and goes to the right location for p and l purposes, for workflow purposes. So we've designed, we feel like the only system on the planet that really is catered to multi entity and multi location businesses. Using AI software to extract and code all the information so you get better quality information. A lot of the work is done by the software itself, and you push that information into the accounting system and then eventually pay your vendors.

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Bradley Bloch [00:02:18]:

So it's pretty simple. Our customers love it, and, you know, we keep improving the system every year, and it just gets better and better of that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:27]:

Yeah, we'll definitely dive more into it. I always like to understand how people got to where they are today and, like, you know, what, what inspired them. So, you know, let's chat a bit about maybe your journey from, from the finance world to the food world. So I'd love to know maybe what sparked that, that shift from, you know, private equity to the restaurant industry. And I know beyond, I know it's not just at restaurant industry, but yeah, I'd love to kind of hear your version.

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Bradley Bloch [00:02:50]:

It's a long winded story of how we got to Factura.ai. But it all started with. So I was working in private equity. We were investing in canadian businesses, doing one to 10 million EBITDA. And we had invested in a large franchise, a restaurant franchise group who had just taken over another brand. They were about to operate like almost 200 locations. And in the back of my mind, at the same time, while this was going on, there was a lot of buzz around fintech. And so we started looking at investing in some financial technology deals, and there was like, pure lending was becoming big in the US, and we started looking at some canadian tech players in the finance space.

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Bradley Bloch [00:03:35]:

And it was just really exciting. And my background is in finance. It's one of my strengths. And I'm like, if I ever wanted to start a business, it would be in this cool new world of, you know, fintech. And in the back of my mind, I've always wanted to start my own business, and. But I never really had the idea of what to do. And then just looking at the customers that we were dealing with in private equity, doing the investments, my portfolio companies, I was doing a lot of the financial modeling for them and forecasting out and making sure that, you know, this, they had enough cash on their books to operate. Or if we were investing in a company, I would look at their model and, you know, validate whether it was legit or not, and kind of push it out to see if we were to invest, what that would look like from a return perspective going forward in the future.

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Bradley Bloch [00:04:27]:

Theme appeared where businesses doing one to 10 million EBITDA, they really have an accountant. They might be called a CFO, but they're really an accountant. And so I ended up partnering with a software developer. It took me a long time to find a software developer because I didn't know that world, but I finally found one. His background, he worked at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the canadian pension Fund. And the two of us went off to go build this, this essentially robo CFO. We wanted to go build that, and we ended up in an incubator called Next AI. It was the inaugural year in 2017, and we have to leave our corporate jobs to go start this startup and just timing worked out the next day, I was starting around that time, too, and we went into this incubator for five months.

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Bradley Bloch [00:05:14]:

And while we were there, we learned a lot. And what we also learned is to run our models, we need a lot of data, which it was hard to get from customers, and we couldn't be one model for everything. We had to find an industry that really had that type of data. So iterative daily data to do forecasting off of. And based on my background in private equity investing in this restaurant group, I saw how they were doing everything in Excel, and I was. Ended up building their models for them, right? I was like, you know, if you look at the restaurant world, it's a big industry. Why do all restaurants, not all, but why do they have such a high failure rate? And on the hospitality side, people understand that good food, good service, etcetera. What owners typically don't have is the finance side.

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Bradley Bloch [00:06:02]:

And I was like, you know what? What if we built this robo CFO that could truly help out these restaurant owners on the finance side? And so we kind of focused in on the restaurant world. So then I started to go out and to find restaurant businesses that would pilot our, what we were going to build. And I eventually ended up, through connections, met a Tim Hortons and Wendy's franchisee. At the time, they had 33 locations, and their story was exactly what I thought it was. They had a CFO. He was more of a CPA than a finance individual. You know, they would have a monthly meeting, what's going on in the restaurants. But in between that, they really didn't have visibility into what's going on.

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Bradley Bloch [00:06:46]:

And so, you know, this product of helping, you know, create a robo CFO would have been very useful for them. They kind of twisted in a way, saying, you know what? That's all nice, but what we actually need is just more visibility into a restaurant so we can drill down by every KPI to understand when I. What's going on this location, how does it compare against all my other locations? From a labor perspective, from a sales perspective, where are my problems? And so we ended up building this really robust bi analytics tool called CFO two, which we started to sell in the marketplace and ended up getting a few other customers on that platform as well. And we're like, all right, well, we had a product already built out. Maybe instead of doing this robo CFO, we'll just stick to this product and try to sell it. And that's what we did. Now, with that same group, you know, we were very close with them, and they told us about a problem that they had, which was accounts payable. Everything to them was very manual, manually entering the data into an antiquated accounting system, manually emailing out for an approval process, you know, printing off paper documents and storing it for audit purposes.

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Bradley Bloch [00:07:55]:

Every step was manual. And in addition to that, why the owner really needed help was they were about to acquire 20 more wendy's overnight. So how do you go from 33 restaurants to 53 restaurants overnight and be able to manage all of the AP with two people? Obviously, you couldn't. So, you know, they would have had to hire more people in AP just to handle the volume. Plus, the person who was doing AP, they had two people at the time. One of the individuals, she wasn't really happy because she was really stressed out. You know, she would email people for an approval and no one would ever email her back, so she'd have to follow up and follow up and follow up. And so she was delayed doing her stuff, not because of her own timing, but because relying on other people.

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Bradley Bloch [00:08:38]:

And so we sat down, we watched what they were doing, and ended up building Factura to meet their needs as a multi entity, multilocation business, obviously a QSR business. And we started piloting Factura with them. Now, this is like 2019. CFO two is running. We're growing that side of the business. We're getting customers. Factura.ai is kind of in a pilot stage, you know, pretty much getting the MVP built out with this one customer. But our focus was CFO, too.

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Bradley Bloch [00:09:09]:

And then March 2020 comes and the pandemic hits, and my business goes from whatever it was doing to zero. My customers stopped paying me. You know, I had staff to pay. We didn't know what to do. We were trying to figure it out for about three or four months. We had no revenue coming into the business because restaurants were closed. And it wasn't until the summer that it kind of emerged that, oh, wait, qsrs will do, right? They're still open. But the full service restaurants were closed.

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Bradley Bloch [00:09:37]:

And depending on where you lived, some were closed for up to two years. And so we were still servicing our customers with the data and providing them with the CFO two product. And we're trying to figure out how to survive. And it never really dawned on me because Factura.ai was kind of in the background and we were focused on one product, but when we're trying to figure out how do we survive and what do we do? Like, one day it just clicked is like, you know, we have this product called Factura that we built, and all I hear from it is our customers love it. I never hear from CFO two. I never hear that customers really loved that product. Nobody loves business analytics or data analytics. They just, you know, there's some, like, people who geek out on it and they do like it, but in general, people don't like that for AP, where they're solving problems on a daily basis and making their jobs life easier and work balance easier, they loved it.

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Bradley Bloch [00:10:32]:

And so I was like, all right, maybe I should go see if I can sell factura. And so that's what we did. In the summer of 2020, I started to sell Factura commercially and ended up meeting the largest wendy's franchisee in Canada. And September 2020, they were our first real customer outside of the MVP pilot customer that we had. And I was like, all right, we need to ship gears. So we started to sell Factura. At the time, we still sold CFO two, but CFO two is a lot of work. There's pos integrations there, back of house integrations, there's drive through data integrations.

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Bradley Bloch [00:11:06]:

There's various reports they need to build. It's months of work with Factura. We can get a customer up and running in a day, and it's not a lot of dev work. So from a scalability perspective, Factura is this much more scalable product. It's a more defined problem solver. I know what the challenges are for those end users. Whereas CFO two and business analytics, everyone wants data, but they all want it in their own different way. And so it's very hard to please everyone with lots of data.

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Bradley Bloch [00:11:36]:

And so we could never get the. It was never a defined problem. AP is a defined problem. And so that's kind of how we got to Factura.ai. And what we realized in the marketplace. Sorry, Kaya. What we realized in the marketplace is there's lots of AP systems out there, but we designed something really unique and niche for multi unit restaurants or multi unit businesses, because what's important to them is different than just general AP. When you've got multiple.

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Bradley Bloch [00:12:04]:

If you've got 100 restaurants, you know, our largest customer today has 273 KFCs. We give you one email address. All invoices go through that one email address. How does no other system on the planet knows to say from one email address, identify where this location, sorry, where this invoice should belong to? And it's important because every restaurant has a p, L, their own p and L. And from workflow perspective, how do you set up a business for 273 units in like a day to then manage the whole workflow based on their configuration and their policies. You know, so Factura.ai is specifically designed for that. We excel at that. You know, I can't knock other AP solutions, but we do this better than anyone else on the planet.

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Bradley Bloch [00:12:50]:

Our OCR with AI can get line items. It can do store breakdowns. So if you get an invoice from, like, comcast and you've got 100 locations on it, how do you extract that automatically out of that invoice? Factura.ai can do it. And so we've just designed this. Honestly, I use it every day and it's an amazing software. Like, it amazes me every day and how easy it is.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:13]:

That's amazing.

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Bradley Bloch [00:13:14]:

You train like an individual in like an hour, and they're ready to process thousands of invoices, no problem.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:20]:

That's really cool. How did you go? I always like to understand, you know, how people will go from their, their MVP to, you know, something more sophisticated. And that takes time. But in the early days, how did you kind of get that trust? So when you got that, let's say that first client or second client, you know, the MVP will be what it is, a minimal, viable product. So how did he go about, you know, giving them the value they need with, you know, maybe a skeleton of a product?

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Bradley Bloch [00:13:45]:

You know, I don't know if everyone approaches it this way, but we listen very intently to our customers. And so it's, here's, here's the MVP. It does this. But tell us what your use cases are. What can we keep improving? What can we do better? And my dev team is, you know, the Factura.aiy dev team, they're outstanding. So we're very quick at, like, making updates and changes. So every week it's still today, it's every week new features coming out, but it's listening to our customers and building and designing the system around them. So, you know, as much as if you looked at Factura.ai back when it first started as the MVP, it is completely different today than it was not because we made up the rules and said this is what we should build, listening to our customer base and understanding what their needs are and then building Factura.ai around that.

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Bradley Bloch [00:14:37]:

So I would say it's, it's, um, you know, you put something, you kind of, like, you put something in their lap and then they kind of mold it in a way that works for them. And our belief is if it works for them because they look very similar to other groups, that whatever building and designing and we're adding is very useful for other groups, if they say, you know, we've got a very specific use case that only we do it this way, we kind of shy away from doing that. We kind of, we're building something for the greater good.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:05]:

Right. That makes sense. That makes sense. And just to get an idea, what are some, I always like to hear some like, success stories. So it sounds like you're working with some big groups, like you said, up to, you know, 270 something venues. So whether it's, you know, a group of, you know, like you said, 20 typically to anything to the 200s. What are the typical wins they get after implementing factura?

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Bradley Bloch [00:15:27]:

So it all depends whether you come from an existing software or you're doing things manually. So the big wins that you get from Factura are if you're manually doing things, you can now increase the productivity of your staff by three x or more. And what that means is, if you look at it from a different perspective, is if it took me 3 hours to do, you know, a task, yeah, it now takes me an hour or probably less than and then our to do that. So you have two options. You can reduce your staff by, you know, get rid of two thirds and still live with one third, or you now are in a position to grow. So when I talk back to that first QSR group, they started with 33 locations, two AP staff. They're now at 68 locations with two AP staff. I think they can get to 100 locations with two AP staff doing the same amount of work.

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Bradley Bloch [00:16:19]:

So it's. And you talk to their AP coordinator there, she had a three day month end close deadline, always missed it. Now she does it in two days. So she has extra time to work on other areas of the business. So what happens with AP is it just becomes such an efficient area that things are moving very quickly that opens up opportunities for other areas of work or scaling. Know, bring on more locations, more invoices, and it still gets handled by the same amount of people. So time saved is the biggest, probably the biggest win of anything.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:56]:

I love that.

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Bradley Bloch [00:16:57]:

Number two, you get visibility. So, and a really simplified process because everything you know now is coming in through. Once one centralized process to that email address. You look at other, you know, how do vendors send invoices? Sometimes to head office, they send it sometimes to the location. Sometimes you have to pull invoices from a vendor portal, sometimes, you know, it's through EDI, sometimes it's this. There's so many different. And it's paper copy or email copy. There's so many different ways.

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Bradley Bloch [00:17:24]:

An invoice actually comes into a business. Well, if you don't have a system in place, it's all over the place. And you have to have processes for everything, every single type. When you have a system like Factura, it simplifies it to email address, auto forwards your AP inbox into if it's email, if you get an email, forward it in. If you have a paper copy, scan it, email in, everything just comes in through that way. And so it's a simple way to ingest invoices and you have full visibility to know where this invoice came from, who's touching it, when it's being touched, where it is in the state that it's in at that point in time. And you look at other AP systems, if you have 200 locations, you're going to get 200 different email addresses to send invoices to. So you have to tell your vendors, hey, you got to send it to this one, for this one, this one, or you as an individual operator, you have to then get that invoice, then allocate it out to the proper location.

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Bradley Bloch [00:18:23]:

So Factura.ai, it just saves you time and simplifies things of just getting invoices in. So it gives you visibility, it gives you time back. You know, it gives you the data storage, so you can even do data analytics off of your invoice. So invoice paying your vendors is one thing, but do you ever have time to then do an analysis and say, how much are we spending across our vendors, across all of our locations? Is it the same? Is it different? Where are there opportunities to save money, things like that? And because we've extracted all this data, there's rich data there. It's not just a document storage system, it's information storage system. So within seconds, you can start to do that analysis and start to really understand what's going on in your business.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:07]:

That's really cool.

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Bradley Bloch [00:19:09]:

It gives you the concern to keep going.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:10]:

No, no, keep going. I love it.

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Bradley Bloch [00:19:11]:

It gives you the controls in place. So as you grow, you want more controls. You know, you're removed at head office from what's going on on the ground. So you want to make sure that you have an approval process that meets your needs. And if you're a controller, it's called a controller because you want controls in place. In a business is Factura.ai allows you to do that and allow you to create your own policies, get it customized to your business, and then allow the system to manage that. So, you know, I could go on with a million other benefits, but at the highest level, Factura solves four pieces of the puzzle. It's data entry.

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Bradley Bloch [00:19:47]:

So automating that data entry, it's managing the workflow, it's the document storage, and then ultimately paying your vendors. So we can also pay your vendors through Factura.ai.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:55]:

It's amazing. Yeah, it's funny because it's something that, you know, people that are not in industry probably don't think of much. But then once you kind of get a glimpse, you're like, man, this is crazy how much time it takes. And the parallel on the wisp side is like things like, you know, that everyone hates, but like inventory or things that, that are so tedious and time consuming. And we're very similar in that sense where it's like, it's not just, okay, cool. I saved 6 hours this week. It's now I have 6 hours to do something else. And whether that's scaling, like you said, or just, you know, not a lot of people got into the industry to do excel work and paperwork and all that, but it's like, it's like the necessary evil.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:33]:

So it's like, how can we make that as painless as possible? And it sounds like that's what you guys are doing is you're just like trying to make it just a lot less painful, a lot more streamlined, a lot more automated, which is really, really neat. I love to hear, like, what do you guys do with. Because I know one of the challenges, you know, we have a lot of restaurant operators that listen, so they'll probably resonate with this one, is sometimes they buy, or a lot of times they buy, let's say, similar produce or proteins, but from different vendors. So I know one hiccup that sometimes they encounter is like, hey, I buy my tomatoes from vendor x, y, and z, and now I got triple the item. So I love to know, like, do you? You know, you guys seem sound pretty, like technologically advanced. How do you guys handle, I guess, item, you know, variations or whatever you want to call them when it's similar item. So you might want to look at the data of how many tomatoes did I buy this year? But now it's like, maybe you buy it from different vendors, different case sizes, different costs per, you know, unit or case, et cetera. So, yeah, I don't know if that's too specific, but I'd love to know.

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Bradley Bloch [00:21:36]:

Yeah, it's very specific. So the answer is you can do an analysis on a line item basis to say, I buy tomatoes from vendor a, b and c. Let me go look at the tomatoes and the price of tomatoes between vendors a, b, and c, you choose the vendors, you choose the products. It's all self serve. You could do that analysis.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:56]:

That's right.

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Bradley Bloch [00:21:57]:

Now as far as then standardizing it to the price because one might be a case or a gallon or whatever the different. The system doesn't do that right now. But typically, we're like a data extraction company. We'll just extract the data on that piece. Your inventory system, whatever you use, should also, if it was a good system and I was designing inventory systems, I would also have that capability of, like, you know, here's an item id. It's tomatoes. I want to know the price of tomatoes between my three different vendors, because ultimately, it's going to be at the inventory level, is probably the same product. Right.

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Bradley Bloch [00:22:33]:

It's tomato or hothouse tomato specifically. So we don't. We're not an inventory system. We extract the data off of the invoice and can pass it to the inventory system. So I would say there's some capability of analyzing a tomato versus tomato versus tomato in our system, because you have that ability to do that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:52]:

But that makes sense, the standardization, all that stuff.

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Bradley Bloch [00:22:56]:

If I was designing an inventory system, that's what I would have, analytics within that system.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:01]:

I love that we got. Yeah, we got to talk about working together because there's definitely something there. And it's funny because you have a very analytical mind, and you literally described how Wisk works, which, surprisingly, is not the norm. Not to say Wisk is the best, but, like, there's a lot of inventory systems out there that a tomato is not a tomato. And so now you got eight different tomato items, and you gotta pick one in your recipe where you nailed it. And it's. What we do is you have one Wisk id or item id, and then you have many variations, but then you're mapping it to the recipe one. So, yeah, you nailed it there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:37]:

Yeah. Really, really cool. And then I just love to hear, like, just say, I like to always paint the picture for, like, our listeners, you know, so there may be people listening. I know you said generally. Generally you're a good fit for 20 restaurants plus. So if someone's listening. Okay, this sounds interesting. What does the process look like? Do they just go to your website? Do they book a demo? Do they start scanning invoices? I'd love to hear, just kind of paint that picture for them of what it looks like.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:59]:

And then how do they go from point a to then? All 20 venues.

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Bradley Bloch [00:24:03]:

Sure. So just so the listeners know so we've got businesses that range from restaurants. They could be full service restaurants, QSR restaurants, they could be hotels. We've got dental offices. We also have apartment buildings. So the system was designed for multi entity and multi location businesses. Step one, step two is from an onboarding perspective, it really comes down to the systems that they use. So I fully believe that we're a piece of the puzzle, but we're not the true source of information.

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Bradley Bloch [00:24:37]:

The true source of information is always your inventory system, because that's what keeps your items and all that stuff. And number two is your accounting system. So that's where your vendors live. You know, all the, you know, your chart of accounts live, it's there. So it. So we're like an add on to the different systems. So step one is what accounting system, what inventory system do you work with? And do we have an integration already with it? If not, you know, we can add an integration for those. But if we're looking at like, you know, API, and it also comes down to the quality or the vintage of these systems, meaning how legacy are they? That's right.

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Bradley Bloch [00:25:20]:

Is it cloud based? If it's cloud based, great. There's an API. We can get you set up with an API much faster than we can without the API. It's not that there's just more work because we have to get information out of a system, put it into our system, and then vice versa is take information out of our system and put it into that system through typically CSV files.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:39]:

Right?

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Bradley Bloch [00:25:40]:

So that's step one. But once we figure out, you know, what your needs are, we gather really a few data points, all your location information, so the entities, the addresses, et cetera. We get your chart of accounts, we get your vendor list, we get the terms of your vendors, and you give us what your policy is for your workflow. Now with that, we can set up your profile. Typically we get it today, you'll be up and running by tomorrow.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:09]:

Oh, wow.

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Bradley Bloch [00:26:10]:

Now, if you're integrated into like an API enabled accounting system, like Netsuite or sage intact or QuickBooks online, you know, there's different processes of adding us and getting connected to your account. They all vary, but it's pretty simple. Sometimes there's a form to fill out or, you know, settings to fill out. Sometimes it's logging in through our platform to get into the other platform. But essentially, once we get web service access to these other platforms, you're live pushing and pulling data from each of the systems. Typically turnaround for like an API system is a day or two to be onboarded, you can start throwing invoices into the system. It'll work. Obviously, you need to be trained on how the system works, which we provide the training.

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Bradley Bloch [00:26:55]:

It's super easy and super quick. And if it's a system that we haven't integrated with, then obviously there's more work to do that integration, which might take weeks. Typically it's weeks to get that done. If it's an older system where it's just a CSV file, give us a day or two and we can mimic what that format is for that CSV file and you can import it, export, etcetera. So it's pretty quick from that perspective. That's really it. It's just systems up and running. You're training it and within a week you should be, you know, live.

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Bradley Bloch [00:27:30]:

Obviously the larger groups like to test it out. They want to see the workflow works and they want to do that and.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:36]:

Pilot in one location maybe and.

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Bradley Bloch [00:27:39]:

Yeah, so that's, you know, that's up to them as how they want to roll that out. Right. But you know, if it was my restaurants and I had 20 restaurant locations, like tomorrow, I could be set up and off to the race as I am and just.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:52]:

That's awesome. That's awesome. And I know you, I know you mentioned generally you do well with, you know, the more complex, or I should say multi unit locations. Is this also like a fit if, you know, I know, ideally 20 plus. But like, if a single venue locations, listen to this. Is this something they could use? Or generally you're like, when it comes to single venue, we're too advanced or too pricey or too, like, is there still a fit there or. Not really.

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Bradley Bloch [00:28:18]:

So it comes down to the number of invoices then is if you're a single venue, like, I don't know, you have a hotel and you're processing a thousand invoices, we're probably a good fit for you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:29]:

Got it.

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Bradley Bloch [00:28:30]:

If you're a restaurant and you're doing 50 invoices, we're not a good fit for you. There's other AP solutions out there that really cater to SMBs and. And it works. And the reason for that is not because, you know, our system could work for you. It's. There is a minimum price that you'd have to pay and it just economically, you don't want to pay what that price is. But also you don't need a lot of what we do. You don't need the workflow.

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Bradley Bloch [00:28:57]:

Typically, if you have one location you don't need the address matching because you have one location. You just don't need such a robust system for your needs when you have one location. So my recommendation would be find that other AP solution that works for one restaurant. That's why it typically is around ten restaurants. Ten locations in the restaurant space is. Now you're getting up to volume, now you're getting up to workflow needs. Now you're getting up to different needs, even graduating from a quickbooks online into a more mid market level accounting system.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:32]:

Right. That makes sense.

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Bradley Bloch [00:29:33]:

That's just where we kind of sit today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:35]:

I love that. And it's funny, I think I read online that you mentioned saving trees is one of the benefits of Factura. I'd love to learn more about that. Tell me a bit more about how you guys are saving trees.

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Bradley Bloch [00:29:49]:

Well, if you think about it, for audit purposes, you have to keep invoices for seven years. And so the old way was you have to print it off, you put into a filing cabinet, and it's gonna sit there, you know, collecting dust.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:01]:

Right.

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Bradley Bloch [00:30:02]:

You don't have to do that anymore because once the. It's either emailed in straight into the system, or if the vendor does provide a paper, you scan it, but that's it. There's no extra paper that. That needs to come out. The other piece is sometimes, you know, imagine you were manually sending invoices for approval. So what do you do? You email someone, you got to approve this invoice. What do they do? They print that out. They then sign that paper, scan it, send it back in for you to then print it out on your side, to then file it away.

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Bradley Bloch [00:30:36]:

So if you think about it is, you know, I can't save all the paper because vendors still, you know, drop paper copies off. But if they didn't do that, there'd literally be no paper copies of these invoices. It's all interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:48]:

That's funny.

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Bradley Bloch [00:30:49]:

I wonder.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:50]:

I wonder if you guys could even gamify that and just show an account, like, how many trees they saved. You know, with some rough math on, like, based on these many invoices, you've saved, you know, 700 trees this year.

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Bradley Bloch [00:31:01]:

Yeah, I did. I did once. Look it up, and it was like, I think either one tree is like 10,000 papers. Like pieces of paper, something like that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:10]:

Got it.

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Bradley Bloch [00:31:11]:

It's something like it's there. Five or 10,000, I forget. But it's, you know, that's what you get out of a tree. So if your one business, you know, has saved 10,000 individual pieces of paper for the year. You've literally saved one tree.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:24]:

That's awesome. I love that. And let me ask you this. Looking ahead, kind of where do you think that intersection of tech and restaurant or restaurant industry is going? Are there any trends or maybe innovations.

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Bradley Bloch [00:31:41]:

That you're particularly excited about in just general? I think if you look at the general restaurant, I think robotics is probably going to be the biggest tech change for these restaurants is labor is getting expensive, depending on which state you're in, like California, they've got new rules. You know, it's getting even more expensive for certain labor. And at some point, you know, unfortunately, the robots, you know, work out well from an investment perspective. So I think, you know, if they're not already here, which they are, and, you know, you started, is you're gonna start to see more and more robotics do a lot of the, you know, back of the house stuff, that it's hard to find labor to do it. And if you can, you know, what do you have to pay these individuals? And so that's what, like, you know, you look at the flippy of the world, like the one that's, I forget who I think is White Castle as a flippy. And it's like helping, you know, helping automate a lot of the steps and processes that you can't find human labor to even do. So I think that's a big thing that you'll start to see. I think, you know, just the pandemic and the way people buy has changed.

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Bradley Bloch [00:33:00]:

You know, it's all mobile orders, drive thru orders. So the footprint of restaurants obviously don't have to be as big. From a QSR perspective, I think you have to have that experience. I think, you know, if you're going to have a full service restaurant, it's one thing to have food, but it's got to be just on the experience itself. That's what drives people to come back. Obviously, that's not technology, but.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:25]:

I think.

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Bradley Bloch [00:33:25]:

Everyone'S looking for automation everywhere where they can. That's why robotics will probably be the biggest thing you look at from an accounting perspective. A lot of groups in the last couple years have upgraded to more of a cloud based system to allow for remote work to allow for just their growth, how they scale and visibility. We are along for that ride as well. From a finance perspective, is when you upgrade to a new accounting system, you also typically upgrade your AP process. No?

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:01]:

Well said. Well said. I think the robotics makes a ton of sense, especially like you said in the QSR space, you know, whether it's direct replacing or to your. To your point, maybe just more output. So maybe instead of three employees, you need one. But they got the help of machines. But it's interesting. Yeah, you mentioned the flippy.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:17]:

I think there's that, like, Chipotle. They were testing the avocado slicer thing, and there's the, you know, I think there's also, like, the assembly line thing they're testing up anyways. But there's a lot of interesting robotics, to your point. And then I think on the full service side, for now, it's still a lot of, like, stuff you may not see. Well, I mean, the customer you may not see. So whether it's inventory systems or AP systems, but it's more back of house. Like, let's automate a lot of this. And for me, what's funny is, like, I think COVID or post COVID, like, it's kind of accelerated the adoption of tech to the restaurant industry.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:52]:

But pre COVID, I would say, generally, it's still very archaic. Right. Like, the. The coolest thing that happened might be, like, you know, in the last, I don't know, 20 years was, like, reservation systems and then cloud based pos. And those are probably the two coolest thing. Like, wow, you can sell it on iPad, and I can reserve online. And post COVID, it's just like, it feels like it kind of started growing exponentially. And there's so much tech and AI and robotics and could be overwhelming for restaurants, too.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:19]:

But hopefully, if they do their due diligence, they can pick and find the right tools to actually help their bottom line and help them be more profitable.

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Bradley Bloch [00:35:27]:

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. You got to find that fine balance between what's cool and exciting versus what actually is saving time, money, and helping run a more efficient restaurant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:39]:

Exactly. Well, having said that, one of the things I like to always ask before we wrap up is just any advice to either fellow entrepreneurs or restauranters who are also entrepreneurs. You obviously went from finance to your first startup to then kind of pivoting and finding a super clear pain point that you're solving for with factura. So just any advice you want to give to entrepreneurs listening?

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Bradley Bloch [00:36:03]:

Sure. Oh. So I would say, if you are going to start a business, go find a problem to solve. I think we did it the opposite way of we were going to go build a product and then try to find customers that it's like, feel the dreams. Like, if you build it, they will come. And I don't think that's the right approach to building any, any service or product is first go find customers that have a problem, and there's enough customers that you can go build something to meet their needs, that nothing exists today to solve their problem, or you can solve it in a better way that will exponentially be better than whatever the system is out there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:48]:

Right.

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Bradley Bloch [00:36:49]:

And then number two is find out the unit economics. In the restaurant world, it's easy to understand. I've got to make sure my labor costs, my food costs, and my overhead costs are more positive than negative. Right. So you have certain levers you can do. You can minimize labor costs, you can lower overhead, you can increase prices to reduce your cost of food. You have to understand all those levers, and you have to understand how it all works and play around with it and make sure that you're making money. And so with any business you're starting, whether it's a tech business or a restaurant business, is find the unit economics that work for you so that you can build a profitable business.

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Bradley Bloch [00:37:34]:

You know, we are a profitable business today, and it's because we made sure that the unit economics worked out for us. Now, for a lot of other businesses, which sometimes you're like, oh, the restaurant world is big. There's 800,000 restaurants or whatever the number is. Right. Yeah, I'm going to go sell door to door a system, and I'm going to make $50. And so on scale, I'm going to get every restaurant and do that. And you might be able to, but it's extremely hard. So you got to figure out how you sell a product.

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Bradley Bloch [00:38:05]:

Also comes down to is what product you're selling. And so that's just my advice from an entrepreneur perspective is it's one thing to have the idea. It's also to understand the business model and the distribution model and how that's all going to work to actually, in the end, make money in restaurants different is what is my distribution model? It's drive through or it's getting people in the door is, or it's takeout and delivery or catering. And can I do that with a margin that makes me money? And in the end, to make it all worthwhile and invest in employees and take care of your employees and utilize that extra capital to then go reinvest in the business to grow your business.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:50]:

Right.

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Bradley Bloch [00:38:51]:

You know, some have aspirations of having one restaurant. Some have aspirations of having 100 restaurants. You know, if you can, if you, you can, if you do it right, you can do it and you can, you know, you can be very successful. You just have to make sure that you, you understand that the economics, that makes sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:07]:

And last but not least, I'd love to know just what's next on the horizon for factura, if is there anything, whether it's upcoming, you know, features or partnerships or anything you're excited about, I'd love for you to just share and then, yeah, just wrap up with plugging away how people can reach you and reach fact zero.

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Bradley Bloch [00:39:27]:

Sure. So things that we're working on today. So if you look at AP, what we do today is accounts payable. It's really on the invoicing side. But if you look at a business, you know, that spend on AP is just a small portion of their spend. There's also payroll, which, you know, we don't want to touch payroll, but that's, you know, that's another piece of spend. But then there's also the other spend. It's employee spent.

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Bradley Bloch [00:39:52]:

You know, if they go to Home Depot and they buy lumber or they did, you know, bought ball, whatever, is. How do you manage the expense management of spend management of your business? And so we want to enhance, we have a very simple solution today, which takes receipts and, you know, you can push that information to the accounting system, but we want to enhance that to make it on par with the other systems out there today that do expense management. And so we believe that we should have a solution for all spend that happens outside of payroll. And so that's what we're going to build for the rest of the year. We're also working on how do we enhance our data extraction capabilities. So we are going to look at other technologies that have come out in the last little while, like generative AI is we use OCR. With AI, it's learning, it's understanding. How can we use a totally different model? Validate the two models together and make sure that you're getting better data extraction out of the end.

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Bradley Bloch [00:40:51]:

So that's something that we're going to work on this year. You know, we're at 90% plus of your data extraction, but how do we get it to 95%?

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:59]:

Right?

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Bradley Bloch [00:40:59]:

And so it just helps. We always fully believe that a human should be in the loop, on your side to review and make sure that the data is correct. We never want to fully replace, you know, the AP team. That's never our goal, but it's, how can we just help them out and make their lives a lot easier? So I'd say those are our two big projects for the year. You know, we're working on a few other things, like listening to our customers, always listening to customers, building things out. Like a statement reconciliation is we have a very simple statement reconciliation today. How do we enhance that? How do we make it more user friendly? And so it's something that keeps coming up in calls is, do you guys have a statement reconciliation? And the answer is, yes, we do. But, you know, I think we need to improve on that.

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Bradley Bloch [00:41:42]:

So it's little things like that that we're just going to make the system better and better and handle our customers and the use case for our customers that, you know, if you're a multi entity, multi location business, we just want. We want to be the best solution out there for you. And I'd say over the last four years, since we've had our products, we've more recently started to become well known for that. And I think that's going to be our mark in this world. And that's why we're helping over 2000 locations today using pure software. That's the other thing that I didn't mention earlier is a lot of the times we've got other AP solutions. It takes twelve to 24 hours for them to turn around and invoice. So you're waiting.

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Bradley Bloch [00:42:28]:

And the reason for that typically, is they have humans doing the actual data entry. It's software, but it's humans.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:34]:

Right?

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Bradley Bloch [00:42:35]:

So ours is all technology. So invoice comes in 30 seconds later, it's coded and extracted. So you can literally have like a five page Cisco invoice coded within 30 seconds and done.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:47]:

Wow.

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Bradley Bloch [00:42:47]:

So it's just. It's just. It's just an amazing solution.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:52]:

That's awesome. That sounds exciting. And so for people who want to find you, this is your opportunity to plug, you know, where they can find you. Where they can find Factura. Yeah, go for it.

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Bradley Bloch [00:43:03]:

So if you go to Factura AI or Google Factura AI, you'll be able to find our website. There's a place there to book a demo, or you can reach out at sales S A L E s, Factura AI. And someone from my team will definitely respond. That's the other thing that I didn't really mention is customer service is really a big differentiator between us and a lot of platforms. And I fully believe this is what I say is you're in the restaurant world. You know, you're a customer service business that sells food. So what am I? I'm a customer service business that sells AP is from a customer service perspective, you're not going to find another company that out services you from an AP perspective better than Factura is. We're attentive, we listen, we are responsive, and we just want to make sure that we fix whatever your issue is and you're on your merry way to go on to the next invoice.

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:57]:

I love that. Well, Bradley, thank you for joining us today on the Wisking at all podcast. Once again, Bradley Block, CEO of Factura AI.

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Bradley Bloch [00:44:06]:

Angelo, thank you so much.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:08]:

It was a pleasure. Feel free to check out Wisk AI for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for you.

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