One Workflow, 19 Locations: How Wilco Hospitality Streamlined Accounts Payable with Wrk
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Who is Wilco Hospitality?
Wilco Hospitality is an Alabama-based restaurant group whose concepts include Taco Mama and Otey’s Tavern. Taco Mama is a fast-growing restaurant brand built around fresh food, a lively atmosphere, and a people-first approach to hospitality.
As Wilco Hospitality’s restaurant operations expanded, so did the volume of financial information moving between individual locations, vendors, and its central finance team. Keeping accounts payable records accurate across multiple restaurants required the team to process invoices for everything from produce and ingredients to other supplies needed for day-to-day operations.
Industry Snapshot
Multi-location restaurant groups manage a continuous flow of vendor invoices. Each location may work with multiple suppliers, purchase different products, and submit invoices in different formats. Those invoices must then be reviewed, coded, entered into the company’s accounting platform, attached to the correct record, and approved for payment.
Even when restaurants use specialized financial software, much of the work leading up to the invoice approval can remain manual. Finance teams may still need to monitor shared folders, open every document, read invoice details, enter line items, select the correct vendor and general ledger account, and attach the original file.
This becomes especially challenging when invoice scans or photographs are unclear, vendor names do not exactly match the records in the accounting system, or individual items are difficult to assign to the correct general ledger code. Across a growing restaurant group, these repetitive steps can consume significant finance-team capacity and increase the risk of inconsistent data entry.
The Challenge
Wilco Hospitality was managing vendor invoices across a growing network of Taco Mama locations. The workflow now covers 19 restaurant locations, each submitting invoices for the products and supplies required to operate the restaurant.
Invoices were uploaded into designated Dropbox folders, creating a central collection of documents for the finance team to process. From there, an employee had to complete the remaining accounts payable steps manually:
Upload new invoices to Dropbox
Open and review each invoice individually
Interpret documents that were sometimes unclear or based on low-quality images
Identify the correct vendor and restaurant location
Read the enter invoice numbers, totals, line items, and other financial information
Assign items to the appropriate general ledger codes
Create the invoice manually in Restaurant365
Attach the original invoice document
Validate the entry before approving it for payment
Although Restaurant365 gave Wilco Hospitality a central platform for managing invoices, payments, and financial information, the data still had to be transferred from Dropbox into the platform. Repeating this process across multiple vendors and 19 restaurant locations created a time-consuming administrative workload for the finance team.
Wilco Hospitality needed a way to automate invoice creation without removing the team’s ability to review financial information, resolve unusual cases, and approve invoices before payment.
The Wrk Solution
Wrk built one end-to-end accounts payable workflow connecting Dropbox and Restaurant365. The workflow combines webhooks, AI, optical character recognition (OCR), API integration, web automation, and human-in-the-loop review to automate invoice processing while keeping Wilco Hospitality’s finance team in control of exceptions and approvals.
The process begins as soon as a restaurant location uploads an invoice into one of the Dropbox folders monitored by Wrk. A webhook immediately notifies the workflow that a new file is available, eliminating the need for an employee to repeatedly check Dropbox for new documents.
Wrk then uses AI and OCR to read the invoice and extract the information required to create the financial record. This can include:
Vendor information
Invoice number and date
Invoice amount
Individual line items
Product descriptions and quantities
Other information needed for coding and invoice creation
Once the invoice information has been extracted and structured, Wrk uses its Restaurant365 API integration to create the corresponding accounts payable invoice in Wilco Hospitality’s existing system. Web automation is then used to attach the original invoice file to the newly created Restaurant365 record, ensuring the finance team can review the source document alongside the extracted information.
The automated workflow:
Detects a new invoice as soon as it is added to a monitored Dropbox folder
Retrieves the uploaded file automatically
Uses AI and OCR to read the document and extract invoice details and line items
Identifies the appropriate vendor, restaurant location, and accounting information
Creates the invoice in Restaurant365 through an API integration
Uses web automation to attach the original invoice to the Restaurant365 record
Routes unclear information or unmatched accounting details to a person for review
Leaves the completed invoice ready for the finance team to validate, adjust if necessary, and approve for payment
Human Review Where It Adds Value
Restaurant invoices are not always perfectly standardized. A supplier may use an acronym on an invoice while Restaurant365 stores the vendor’s full legal name. An unfamiliar product description may also make it difficult to determine the correct general ledger code automatically.
Instead of allowing these exceptions to stop the entire workflow or creating an invoice with uncertain information, Wrk uses human-in-the-loop automation. When the workflow cannot confidently match a vendor or assign an item to a general ledger code, it sends an email containing a form that asks an authorized team member to provide the missing information.
Once the exception is resolved, the workflow can continue. This allows Wilco Hospitality to automate routine invoice processing while preserving human judgment for the financial decisions that require it.
Key Results
Manual Invoice Creation Removed Across 19 Locations
→ Wilco Hospitality’s finance team no longer needs to monitor Dropbox, open every invoice, manually transcribe its contents, and create each Restaurant365 record from the beginning. One workflow now handles these repetitive steps across 19 Taco Mama locations.
More Time for Higher-Priority Finance Work
→ By removing much of the manual work involved in creating invoices, Wrk gives the finance team more time to focus on pressing financial responsibilities. Employees can concentrate on validation, exception handling, approvals, and other work that requires their experience instead of repetitive data entry.
Faster Movement from Submission to Approval
→ Invoice processing begins as soon as a file is added to a monitored Dropbox folder. The workflow retrieves the document, extracts the information, creates the Restaurant365 record, and attaches the source file without waiting for an employee to begin each step manually. The finance team receives a prepared record that is ready for review and approval.
Reduced Risk of Manual Data-Entry Errors
→ AI and OCR extract invoice information and apply a consistent process across every document. This reduces the risk associated with repeatedly transcribing invoice numbers, amounts, line items, vendor details, and accounting information by hand. Uncertain vendor matches or general ledger codes are escalated for review rather than being silently entered.
Source Documents Remain Connected to Financial Records
→ Web automation attaches the original invoice file to the corresponding record in Restaurant365. This gives the finance team access to the source document during validation and approval, supporting clearer records and easier follow-up when questions arise.
Automation Without Losing Financial Oversight
→ Wrk automates invoice intake and record creation while leaving Wilco Hospitality’s team responsible for final validation, any necessary adjustments, and payment approval. Human-in-the-loop safeguards ensure that exceptions receive attention without requiring employees to manually process every routine invoice.
A Scalable Foundation for Restaurant Growth
→ The workflow now supports 19 restaurant locations and can be extended as Wilco Hospitality adds eligible locations or processes higher invoice volumes. The same model can also be adapted for other hospitality groups using Dropbox and Restaurant365, or connected to financial platforms such as QuickBooks when a similar invoice process exists.
How One Focused Workflow Transformed a Core Finance Process
Wilco Hospitality began with one clear automation opportunity: moving vendor invoices from Dropbox into Restaurant365. By addressing that single process from beginning to end, Wrk removed multiple repetitive steps that had been repeated across vendors and restaurant locations.
Invoices are detected automatically, read using AI and OCR, structured into financial data, created in Restaurant365 through an API, and connected to their original source documents through web automation. When a vendor name or general ledger code cannot be matched confidently, the workflow brings in a person to resolve the exception before processing continues.
The result is a more efficient accounts payable process that reduces manual invoice creation while preserving the validation and approval controls Wilco Hospitality’s finance team needs. What began as one workflow now provides a scalable foundation for processing invoices across 19 restaurant locations and demonstrates how a focused use case can create meaningful change across broader finance operations.
