AIP Podcast EP 81 - AI-Powered Accounts Payable Automation for Multi-Location Businesses by Factura

This episode's guest, Bradley Bloch, Founder and CEO of Factura.ai, joins host Anne to explore how AI is transforming one of the most overlooked yet critical business functions: accounts payable. Drawing on his experience in billion-dollar M&A transactions and private equity, Bradley shares how he uncovered a major operational challenge facing multi-location businesses and built Factura.ai to solve it. He discusses the unique complexities of managing invoices across restaurant franchises and other multi-entity organizations, the importance of trust and auditability in AI-powered finance workflows, and how Factura.ai helps teams scale without adding headcount. Plus, Bradley offers his perspective on the rapid evolution of AI, the future of AP automation, and why operational efficiency is becoming a key competitive advantage. Tune in to learn how Factura.ai is helping restaurants, hotels, healthcare providers, and other multi-location businesses streamline financial operations and unlock new levels of productivity.

Follow AIP Affiliate, Factura.ai
Website: https://factura.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/factura-ai/

Follow AI Partnerships
Website: https://www.aipartnershipscorp.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aipartnershipscorp/
X: https://twitter.com/AIPartnerships

The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Accounts payable might not sound glamorous until you're running 50 restaurant locations and drowning in invoices. In this episode, I sit down with Bradley Block, the CEO and founder of factura.ai, the only AP automation platform, purpose built for multi-unit, multi-entity restaurant operators. Now, Bradley brings a red blend of Wall Street finance, think $4 billion in MA deals and sculpture billing and private equity and royal it, and deep operational empathy for the franchisee world. He channels how he spotted the crippling inefficiency hiding in plain sight across thousands of restaurant bank offices and why AI is the only tool powerful enough to fix it at scale. If you run multi-location operations, manage a finance team, or just want to understand how AI is quietly transformation transforming the unsexy but essential parts of business. Now this one's for you. Stacks of invoices, mineral data entry, missed discounts, approval bottlenecks. It's the stuff that keeps finance teams up at night. Now my guest today spotted this problem through a very unusual lens. Bradley Block spent years doing billion-dollar MA deals at Scotiabank and investing in mid-market companies through private equity before he finally pivoted to build tectura.ai, an AI-powered AP automation platform designed specifically for multi-unit restaurant operators. We're talking franchisees, running McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy's, Domino's, the people who keep the world fed. Bradley, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

You've done MA at Scotiabank, private equity at Royland, and then you end up building software for restaurant invoices. Walk me through that career arc. What did you see that others missed?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

In my heart, I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always wanted to own my own business. And I think, you know, when you get a when you work for someone else, it's it's the opportunity to learn and you know pick up skills that you know you might not have. And so, you know, working for um the bank, I was able to learn how the bank runs. I was also able to learn how businesses run and really understand what makes a good business and what makes a bad business. And so I think that was really the foundation for me as to, all right, I have now the skills to really build a business and operate a business and understand how to make it profitably. Um as far as like getting into the AP business, I think it's um I always say that we were like a river, is you know, we're we're going with the flow as to where the worlds and the market is kind of taking us. When I left the corporate world, we wanted to do um a different product. I wanted to build a cash flow forecasting business. And you know, we tried that and started speaking to customers and trying to figure out a business model and figure out all the pieces that you need to do to start a business. And it just didn't work exactly how I thought it was gonna work at the outset. And we ended up building another different product altogether in the restaurant world that was more around reporting, and you know, we were able to help some of our customers around that. And um, but you know, we kept hearing from a few of our customers a problem around AP, and we said, you know what, let's go help solve that problem. And so, you know, life is never linear, it's always it just zigzags. I always say, like a river, if you actually look at like a river from you know the top, it's there's never a straight river. And so to answer your question about the arc from you know a career to to where we are is I I I don't think I ever envisioned that this is where we would be, but it's kind of where the market and where really this the problems are, and so we ended up finding a problem that I I thought we could solve.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

It's amazing. You know, most people think that AP automation is just scanning PDFs and pushing data around. What does Factor actually do that generic accounting software can't? And why does multi-unit change everything?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Yeah. So if you think about how these multi-location businesses are actually structured from an accounting perspective, it's actually different than just our normal business. Um, each location has their own PL. And so you have 100 locations, you literally have 100 PLs within your accounting books, versus you have one business, you know, you have maybe different, you know, different divisions, different um things, but it's all one PL. So structurally it's different. And depending on the nuances of how you've account, you know, structured your accounting, maybe it's standardized GLs, maybe it's not standardized GLs, maybe it's standardized vendor lists, maybe it's not standardized vendor lists. You know, every business has it set up differently, but there's really no um AP solution that really mimicked how your accounting was set up. So that's that's you know um bright light number one. Number two is you're 100% right. Everyone focuses on from an AP solution on let's solve manual data entry, you know, getting the data extraction. But if you actually take a step you know before that, is well, how do you get invoices into a system? When you're you know one location, that's no problem. You get one email address, send it in, it's gonna pick up the one location, it's gonna go get coded, etc. But when you have a hundred locations, how do you know where the invoice belongs to? Because at the end of the day, it has to go to a very specific PL, a different one than you know, store number 33. And so on the ingestion of invoices, you have to solve for that as well. So that's you know another nuance to what how Factura handles just accepting invoices and figuring out and routing it to the right spot based on information off of an invoice. Then obviously, we do the coding like you know, other solutions. I think we do it a little bit better in some scenarios, um, getting line items, doing things like that. And hold on. And sorry to interrupt my daughter. Um but um you know, then you think about the workflow. And on the workflow itself is also nuanced with there's locations that you know need invoices to go to. There are different thresholds, different people that are involved. Sometimes it's just the general manager, sometimes it's district manager, sometimes it's VPs, sometimes there's different departments within a restaurant. So you've got what I always call is like you've got a lot of moving pieces. It's a lot of chaos. How do you simplify the chaos? And that's really what Factora does is you know, it just the invoice, does all the work for you to know that this invoice belongs to this location, does the data extraction the way you want it, routes it to the right approver, pushes it off to your ERP or accounting system, and you know, you ultimately pay your vendor. And so it's we've taken the pieces where most other AP solutions that are horizontal kind of skip because it's not their customer base, where we really focus on and and you know solve for those those challenges.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

That's very useful. Now, you know, AI and finance is a combination that, as you might imagine, most CFOs will get a little bit nervous about it, particularly because of accuracy, auditability, and compliance. So, how do you earn trust in a space where a single misposted invoice can cause real damage?

SPEAKER_01 8:26

So I think you hit the nail on the head. Auditability is like, call it step one. You know, if you throw, you know, you you run into an LLM model, you say do this, you don't know what the output is going to be. It's going to give you different answers all the time, potentially. And so, you know, you can't, you know, there's a trust factor, but is why does it, why does it choose this? Why did it choose that? And, you know, sometimes you can't answer it. In our case, we can't answer. We know how we've designed the system. We we have the audit trail of what everything is doing, and so we know why the system picked this output. Maybe not the right output, but it picked it, and we know and we understand it. And so then we can adjust or fix it and say, you know what? The model said do, you know, choose one, but it needs to choose two. We can adjust the model so that it chooses two. And so there's a very there's a traceability to understand you know what's going on. Number one. Number two, you're 100% right. You know, it's just math, right? It's just numbers. And it's just binary. It's either you got it right or you got it wrong. And so we make it very visible to everyone is this is what we extracted. It's not a black box, it's not like nobody sees what's going on, is you can see the information we extracted. You don't like it, we can fix it. But if you like it, you then push it off to the next level. And so there's call it um, you know, there's there's a process in the way. Nothing is blind. And because of that, we're able to, you know, help our customers ensure that the data is accurate. There is an audit trail of everything so that you know, if someone questions what we've done, we can trace it back as to this is what happened. It was a user error, it was a factor error, it was something else, and ensure that you know the data that's going into the accounting system is is correct.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

That's great. Um, in our pre-show conversation, you talked about scaling yourself. And you come from a world of four billion dollar acquisition deals. Does that financial rigor change how you build factura's business model? And how do you pitch ROI to operators while watching every penny?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

So um, yeah, as far as the scaling comments, you know, that was my initial idea of how I want to build a business that was scaling kind of what I was doing, working in private equity and MA around the cash flow forecasting. But I think it's, you know, it's it's relevant to what we do today is most of our customers are in scale mode. You know, they're not they're not static. And what that means is they're they're adding locations, you know, and they're adding sometimes one a year, sometimes some groups are adding 30 a year. They're doubling their account. And the goal is how do you give them their people a tool to make them more productive so they don't have to continuously hire up? It's keep your same operations the way that they it is and allow you to seamlessly scale as you as you grow and you know get and get bigger. And so that's really what Factura really allows you to do at the heart of it is you know it it allows your team to be you know 70, 80% more productive doing the same tasks as they weren't were doing before because a lot of the stuff is off their plate. And I'll give you a you know kind of a case study from one of our first customers is you know, two AP staff, 33 restaurants, um manually doing the approval process, manually doing data entry, you know, a lot of manual, even manual data storage. They're now at 70, I think 72 locations, so more than double their location count. Same two individuals. And what happens is that it's um you know, the task of managing the workflow, that's off their plate. Storing the documents, that's off their plate. The data entry, that's off their plate. And so they literally, with the same people, have you know capacity to grow even further. So you talk about scaling, it's it's all about scale. Is how do you scale and grow a business while maintaining your your fixed costs at a certain level? And and you know, that's just one case study of they were able to do that. And you know, we do that for all of our customers, and most of our customers are in in scaling mode. Once you, once you add, like, you know, you have 20 restaurants or 20 of whatever business that you are, 20 locations, you're typically your goal, I'm not saying always, but typically your goal is to get bigger.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

That's absolutely right. Um, one further rope before we end this uh podcast, what does the next 18 months look like for AP automation in the restaurant industry? And really, is there a version of factura.ai that goes beyond restaurants?

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Yeah, so to answer your first question, you know, I think first and foremost, you know, we want to ensure and make sure that our AP solution is just always you know at the forefront of what's going on. Technology is changing, it's changing rapidly. You know, there's you know, the big name companies that are throwing out LLMs, like every few weeks there's a new model that they come out with that you know is just changing the way technology has been built before, run before, you know, monitored before. And so, you know, that just means it's it's cheaper to build technology than it was before. It means there's you know potential for more competition. But the flip side is you know, we have access to those tools just like everyone else does. And so we want to ensure that you know the system is getting better, the system is getting more accurate, there's less manual touches and things like that. So um it's it helps us and helps our customers at the end to stay with um you know at the forefront of technology. Um, number one. Number two, your question around you know, restaurants and going beyond restaurants, we actually have and already are beyond restaurants. Um you know, we do have hotel customers, we do have property management customers, we've got veterinary clinics, we've got dental offices, medical offices, car washes, massage places. It's really when you look at what is special about Factura, is as much as we start in the restaurant space and really understand the restaurant space, those types of businesses, if you go back to the accounting structure, it's very similar for no matter which industry you're in. And so that's really where Factura can help, is because we understand the accounting and how AP functions with the accounting structure, we're able to help our customers. And that's why, you know, we were able to expand into the you know the industries that I've that I mentioned. They're all very similar. They might just sell something different, but they're all, you know, they all have little nuances here and there. Um, but they all are pretty much from an accounting perspective structured similarly.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

That's great. Well, Bradley, this has been a genuinely eye-opening conversation. Prove that the most transformative AI applications are often hiding in the most overloaded corners of business. So if you're running a multi-location operation and your AP process still lives in spreadsheets and email chains, Fictura.ai is worth a very close look. And to everyone listening, if this episode gave you a new way of thinking about where AI can unlock real operational value, that's exactly why we make this show. Please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share it with a colleague who needs to hear this. Leave us a review. It really does help more people find us. Once again, my name is Anne, your host, and I'll see you at in the next episode of the AIP podcast. Thanks for tuning in.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

Thank you.