AI tools cut hospitality bookkeeping pressure in Australia

Australian hospitality businesses are using Dext's artificial intelligence tools to manage receipts and invoices, a shift that Decimal says reflects growing pressure on venues to cut administrative work as margins tighten.

Cafes, restaurants and bars often process large volumes of supplier paperwork covering food, beverages, cleaning products and other operating costs. For venues that need a detailed view of spending across different parts of the business, that can make bookkeeping and accounts administration difficult.

Steven Blaine, of Western Australia-based hospitality finance and technology partner Decimal, said the manual workload had become a significant issue for operators already dealing with rising costs and labour shortages.

"Running a hospitality business is a real grind at times," Blaine said.

Some larger kitchens receive deliveries every day from multiple suppliers, creating a steady flow of invoices that must be sorted and coded correctly.

"However, technology is changing this, and many venues are capitalising on new ways of working by leveraging AI," he said.

"If you run a large kitchen, you're getting fruit and vegetables every day, seafood, meat and all sorts of deliveries.

"You might have 50 supplier invoices on a weekly basis just for one department.

"On top of this, hospitality businesses require far more granular financial data than many other industries because operators need precise visibility into spending across multiple categories. Applying an AI agent to this challenge means more precision, fewer mistakes and a significant time saving."

Dext's system uses computer vision to read receipts and invoices, including handwritten receipts, then extracts and categorises the data for bookkeeping records. Blaine distinguished these systems from general-purpose generative AI tools, arguing that hospitality operators need software that can process paperwork at line-item level.

Granular spending

That level of detail matters in hospitality because a single supplier may sell several types of goods to the same venue. Food wholesalers, for example, may also provide cleaning chemicals or glassware, making it important to split spending accurately across categories rather than group everything together.

"One of the use cases I always talk about is when kitchens are buying food from wholesalers who also sell them cleaning supplies, chemicals or glassware," Blaine said.

"A hospitality business must understand exactly how much they're spending on each of those categories. They don't want everything dumped into one catch-all bucket, leaving them to guess.

"AI-powered automation can separate these costs easily and precisely, saving the venue huge amounts of time and allowing them to calculate profit from food sales more easily."

Blaine pointed to examples among Decimal's hospitality clients. In one case, a venue bought fruit and vegetables for both its bar and kitchen from the same supplier, but invoices were addressed slightly differently depending on the account.

"One of our hospo clients buys fruit and vegetables for both their bar and kitchen from the same supplier," he said.

"But the invoices are addressed slightly differently depending on the account.

"Before AI, we couldn't automatically code those invoices correctly, separating the two different budgets for the venue's bar and kitchen.

"AI now can seamlessly code everything to the right expense account, without any manual input from us or the venue."

Compliance pressure

Compliance is another issue for venues. Blaine said businesses must know who their suppliers are and ensure those suppliers have valid Australian Business Numbers, particularly if records are reviewed by the Australian Taxation Office.

"Another challenge is knowing who the suppliers are.

"If the ATO audits a venue and they have got cancelled ABNs from suppliers, that becomes a serious issue. It's up to the venue to check that all their suppliers have a valid ABN, and that can be a real pain. Now AI can do that for you," he said.

Decimal also cited a customer example involving fuel levies, where costs needed to be separated from food purchases during a period of higher diesel prices and supply chain pressure.

"Another of our hospo clients wanted anything with a fuel levy coded to a different expense account so that this cost can be claimed back separately. We used the auto-categorisation, line-item extraction and agentic AI rule on Dext to automate the process. The combination of automation, AI-powered data extraction and intelligent categorisation dramatically improves both efficiency and accuracy for hospitality operators," Blaine said.

Wider use

Beyond bookkeeping, AI is appearing in other parts of hospitality operations, including reservations, customer service, analytics and point-of-sale software. Blaine said reservation systems that answer calls and take bookings automatically are one example of venues using software to reduce pressure on staff.

"One really interesting area is AI-powered reservation agents," he said.

"When you ring a venue, instead of a staff member stopping what they're doing to answer the phone, the AI handles the booking, collects the customer information and reserves the table automatically."

He added that AI was also making it easier for operators to query transaction and customer data without manually compiling reports.

"You can ask questions like: 'How many people come back after using the burger-and-pint promotion to buy anything else?'" Blaine said.

"Previously you'd have to manually run reports and analyse the data yourself. Now AI can surface those insights almost instantly."