67 Wendy’s restaurants for Wenspok Companies. One solution for strategic cash flow management.
About Wenspok Companies
Wenspok Companies is a collection of Wendy’s franchisees that own and operate 67 restaurants in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. With $150M+ in revenue, Wenspok operates at a scale where precision, efficiency, and strategic foresight are essential for growth and operational excellence. Every invoice that gets processed, every payment that gets approved, and every expense that gets incurred isn’t just a transaction — it’s a datapoint that’s necessary for the finance team to provide strategic cash flow management. With eyes set on further expansion and operational enhancements, the imperative for a streamlined, efficient, and real-time AP process is a cornerstone for realizing these ambitions.
The Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Providing financial foresight for business operations
Amanda Brown really doesn’t want to talk about Wenspok Companies’ first experience with accounts payable software. “Let’s just say it was an epic fail.”
But… if you were to get her talking about it, she’d have a lot to say: invoices that wouldn’t sync from the AP software back to Sage Intacct; double payments to vendors; a reconciliation nightmare; and an AP automation provider whose support staff understood neither Wenspok’s ERP nor the QSR industry in general.
Suffice it to say, that specific AP automation provider was not a great experience. However, even that experience showed that the need for AP automation itself couldn’t be clearer. As the operator of 67 Wendy’s franchises in 10 states, Wenspok prides itself in its proactive cash flow management. “With a more accurate picture of our operating costs, Wenspok leadership can schedule major operational projects with confidence in budgeting and timing of cash flow requirements,” said Brown, Wenspok Companies’ controller. “For Finance to meet these expectations, we need to process invoices fast.”
In other words, Wenspok companies came to Stampli with two problems: First, they needed a dramatic acceleration in invoice processing speed to provide the business with strategic cash flow guidance; and second, in order to clear the memory of their “epic fail”, they needed a solution that integrated so well with Sage Intacct that it would feel almost like magic.
Solution
Hyper-efficient AP automation unlocks greater business agility
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that Stampli lets customers automate AP without reworking their ERP.
So we can fast forward through the implementation period (“We could not have asked for a better process!” said Brown. “We couldn’t believe how well our implementation specialist knew Intacct!”) and get to the outcome: how Stampli enabled the strategic cash flow management Wenspok needed.
A 75% reduction in average invoice processing time. Brown credits Stampli with reducing their invoice processing time from 28 days to 7. “We cash flow all our remodels or new builds, so we need visibility on the operating costs that are being incurred at the same time to be effective in our financial guidance,” said Brown. “Stampli allows for us to more accurately project cash flow, which helps us provide drastically better financial guidance to our owners.”
An 87% reduction in average days to approval. One of the biggest bottlenecks in any AP process is getting approvals from those outside the finance team. For Wenspok, their old AP process would tie up operators and district managers, who were constantly calling AP looking for additional information on invoices. With Stampli, what once took 16 days now takes 2. “Now anyone from any location can provide insight and answer the questions needed for approval.”
For credit cards, a 73% faster monthly close. With the Stampli Credit Card, Wenspok’s corporate card program is directly integrated into their AP software and workflows. “We’ve gotten our card closing down to 4 days,” says Brown. “We can process transactions daily, so we have visibility into outstanding transactions. We can pull reports to target communications to anyone with outstanding issues. We’ve even increased the number of receipts attached to transactions by 65% — which, like all the other features, gives us that strategic visibility into cash flow.”
These are impressive statistics, but they are a means, not an end. The ultimate impact of Stampli for Wenspok is financial foresight that enables operational agility. From this perspective, Stampli’s impact is felt well beyond the AP team — it has become a critical element of their operational strategy.
Hear it from the customer
With a more accurate picture of our operating costs, Wenspok leadership can schedule major operational projects to avoid cash crunches that might otherwise require taking on debt. At the tactical level, Stampli has created efficiencies across the board — not just on the AP team, but for all our operating team members outside of finance that we consult to validate the bills we receive.
Bottom Line
Everyone on the team levels up
The successful transition to automated AP did more than just enable strategic cash flow management — it also changed the day-to-day for the finance team for the better. In older days, team members couldn’t escape the drudgery of processing invoices. But today? “We’ve repurposed all of the time Stampli saves the finance team for special projects, researching vendors, auditing outstanding credits, and otherwise giving team members the chance to take on more important and impactful projects.”
“We love Billy the Bot”
“Before we brought on Stampli, our AP team was nervous that the AI would be a threat rather than an asset to their jobs,” says Brown. “But with Billy the Bot now performing such time-consuming manual tasks as coding invoices to the correct general ledger accounts, the AP team has seen their responsibilities shift to projects that add much greater value to the business. Today, we think of Billy as a team member, not an AI. Honestly, we love Billy the Bot and frequently refer to it by name.”
How Wenspok Companies Stepped It Up
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