Ottimatevs
Stampli
Stampli: If you want general accounts payable automation with approval collaboration rather than food distributor line-item extraction
Ottimate
Invoice capture and accounts payable automation trained on food and beverage distributor formats
As of 1 September 2026, Ottimate's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. The product formerly sold as Plate IQ, renamed Ottimate. Softwr lists it under Accounting. Ottimate is available on Web, iOS, Android.
Overview
What Ottimate does
Ottimate captures supplier invoices, extracts them to line-item detail rather than header totals, codes them to a general ledger account, routes them for approval and pays the supplier. The extraction engine is trained specifically on the invoice formats of the large food and beverage distributors, which is the reason a restaurant group would choose it over a general accounts payable tool: a Sysco or US Foods invoice with 120 lines is captured at item level, so cost of goods can be tracked by ingredient and price increases spotted between deliveries. The naming needs care. The company launched as Plate IQ in 2012 and rebranded to Ottimate; it is an independent venture-backed business, not a division of AvidXchange, and buyers comparing the two are comparing competitors rather than a product and its parent. Any comparison article that describes Ottimate as an AvidXchange product is wrong, which matters if you are assessing vendor stability or negotiating a contract with the wrong entity in mind. Buyers are multi-unit restaurant groups, hotels and bars with high invoice volume and low back-office headcount, typically anywhere from five to several hundred locations. The trade-off is that the line-item advantage is specific to food and beverage distribution; a business whose invoices are professional services or construction subcontracts gets little from the trained extraction and would be better served by a general accounts payable platform.
What people use it for
- A 40 site restaurant group whose bookkeepers key distributor invoices line by line to track food cost
- An operator that wants to know within a week when a supplier raises the price of an item outside the contracted schedule
- A hotel group standardising accounts payable approvals across properties that each have their own general manager sign-off rules
- A finance team migrating from paper invoice files that needs digital retrieval from supplier portals rather than chasing branches for copies
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Ottimate.
- Nothing is published about price, and quotes are structured by location and invoice volume, so a group with a few high-volume sites and one with many low-volume sites can receive very different numbers for the same total spend
- The line-item extraction advantage is trained on food and beverage distributor formats, so accuracy on long-tail suppliers, service invoices and one-off vendors falls back to general OCR and needs human review
- It is an accounts payable layer, not an inventory or recipe costing system, so operators still need Restaurant365 or an equivalent for true plate costing and the value depends on that integration behaving
- The company has rebranded once already from Plate IQ, and much of the third party comparison material still uses the old name or wrongly attributes it to AvidXchange, which makes independent due diligence unusually hard
- Payment execution through the platform introduces a dependency on Ottimate for supplier relationships, and moving away later means re-establishing payment details with every vendor rather than simply exporting data
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Ottimate
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- OttimatevsBill.com
Bill.com: If your invoice mix is general business spend and you want a widely integrated payables and receivables platform
- OttimatevsTipalti
Tipalti: If you pay international suppliers and need tax and compliance handling across jurisdictions
Pricing
What Ottimate costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Ottimate
On request
- Quoted by location count and invoice volume
- Payment rails may carry separate transaction charges
- Implementation and accounting system integration scoped separately
- No published rate card
Capabilities
Features
Line-item invoice capture
Extraction to individual product lines, not just invoice totals, on major distributor formats
GL coding
Automatic account and location coding with rules that learn from corrections
Approval routing
Multi-step approval by location, amount and category before payment
Supplier payments
ACH, cheque and virtual card disbursement from the platform
Price change alerts
Flags when an item price moves between deliveries against the contracted rate
Purchase order matching
Invoices matched against orders and receipts to catch short deliveries
Digital invoice retrieval
Invoices pulled directly from supplier portals rather than waiting for paper or email
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Ottimate owned by AvidXchange?
No. Ottimate is the rebranded Plate IQ and operates as an independent venture-backed company. AvidXchange is a competitor, not the parent.
What was it called before?
Plate IQ. The company kept the same product and renamed it Ottimate.
Does it work outside restaurants?
It will process any invoice, but the line-item extraction accuracy that justifies the price is tuned to food and beverage distributors. Other industries should test carefully before committing.
Does it replace Restaurant365?
No. It handles invoice capture, approval and payment. Recipe costing and restaurant-specific inventory stay in Restaurant365 or an equivalent.
Keep looking
Where to go from Ottimate
- Ottimate alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Ottimate pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Ottimate badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Accounting softwareThe full category
- Best Accounting softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Accounting software for
Compare Ottimate with
- Stampli
- Tipalti
- Bill.com
- Basware
- Medius Expense
- Yooz
- Moss
- Kodo
- Airbase
- Tropic
- Melio
- RazorpayX
- Sage 50
- Stigg
- Vena Solutions
- ADP
- Medius
- Tropic
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Ottimate, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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