FoodByUs Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs your supplier ordering and chases every credit

FoodByUs sells a clean idea: every wholesale supplier your venue buys from, one login, orders in minutes, invoices captured automatically, and up to 15 per cent off your food costs. The Sydney-built marketplace mostly delivers on the plumbing. What the marketing page skips is who, exactly, is going to sit down every week and use it: place the orders before six different cutoffs, read every captured invoice, lodge the credit for the two missing boxes of romaine, and notice that chicken breast has crept up three weeks running. In most venues the answer is the owner, at 10pm, or nobody.

That gap is the job. Not the software, the operator of the software.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your FoodByUs

The week anchors on the order run. Your kitchen keeps its order guides in FoodByUs, and your VA turns the chef’s rough list, a photo of the whiteboard, a voice note, a scrawled par sheet, into placed orders across every supplier from the one login, each one in before that supplier’s cutoff. Delivery days get sanity-checked against the calendar, because a public holiday week is exactly when the routine order quietly arrives a day late and service pays for it. Confirmations get watched, not assumed. If a supplier hasn’t confirmed by the usual time, the VA is on it before the gap becomes a Saturday morning problem.

Deliveries turn into invoices, and this is where FoodByUs earns its keep and where it most needs a human. The platform captures supplier invoices automatically, line items and all, which means the data exists without anyone typing it. Your VA’s job is to make the data true: each captured invoice checked against what was ordered and what your kitchen says actually arrived, unit prices compared against last week’s, pack sizes eyeballed for the scan that turned a 2kg into a 20kg. Clean data gets approved. Anything off gets acted on, which brings us to credits.

Credits are the most measurable money a VA recovers in this platform. Short deliveries, unapproved substitutions and quality rejections all get lodged as credit requests through FoodByUs the same day the driver leaves, tied to the exact invoice line, with the discrepancy documented. Then they get tracked, because a credit requested and forgotten is a donation. Over a quarter, the log the VA keeps tells you something no gut feeling can: which suppliers are tight, and which one shorts you often enough that the relationship needs a conversation.

Then the watching, which is the part no owner ever has time for. Wholesale food prices move constantly and rarely announce it. Because every invoice flows through one platform, your VA can track line-item prices across all your suppliers week on week and turn the movement into a short note in dollars: what went up, what it does to the dishes that lean on it, and, because FoodByUs is a marketplace, what the same product costs from the alternative suppliers already on the platform. When a comparison makes a switch worth considering, it lands on your desk as a one-paragraph decision. If you say yes, the VA does the setup and the first order with the new supplier; if you say no, nothing changes and you decided that on purpose.

The order guides themselves need a gardener too. Menus change, seasons change, and a guide still carrying the winter braise cuts in November is how the wrong thing gets ordered on a busy Thursday. Your VA keeps the guides matched to the current menu, retires dead lines, adds the new ones with the right supplier and pack size, and keeps par quantities roughly honest against what the kitchen has actually been using, so the weekly order starts from a list that reflects the venue you run now.

Menu costings stay alive instead of decaying. FoodByUs holds dish costings against live ingredient prices, and where your POS is connected the sales side meets the cost side, so the reporting shows not just what a dish costs but how often you sell it. The VA keeps the costings current as approved invoices move the inputs, flags any dish that slides under the margin you set, and costs new menu items properly before they launch rather than three weeks after. A menu costed at launch and never touched again is fiction by winter; a menu somebody re-costs weekly is a management tool.

And at the back end, approved invoices flow through the accounting integration into Xero or MYOB with coding your bookkeeper recognises, failed syncs get chased rather than discovered at BAS time, and your accounts payable arrives as a matched, checked feed. If the same VA also does your broader Xero housekeeping or expense categorisation, the whole trail from loading dock to P&L passes through one careful set of hands.

The honest bit

The 15 per cent number needs adult supervision. FoodByUs can genuinely lower food costs, but the mechanism is not magic, it is behaviour: comparing suppliers, catching billing errors, claiming credits, re-costing dishes and acting on what the numbers say. Every one of those is a human task the platform enables rather than performs. A venue that signs up and keeps ordering on autopilot from the same suppliers at whatever price appears will save close to nothing, and that is not the software failing, it is the seat in front of it being empty.

Invoice capture is capture, not judgement. Automated line-item extraction means nobody types invoices anymore, which is a real saving, but it cannot know the delivery was short, the substitution was unapproved, or the pack size scanned wrong. Skip the human review and you get something worse than no data: confident wrong data, feeding costings you then trust.

Credits depend on your kitchen, not just your VA. A remote VA can lodge, document and chase a credit brilliantly, but only for discrepancies somebody at the venue actually reported. If deliveries get signed for unchecked at 6am, the shortage is invisible to everyone until stocktake. The placements that recover real money pair the VA’s follow-up with a thirty-second receiving habit on the dock: count the boxes, snap a photo of anything wrong, send it to the VA. That habit is yours to enforce; everything after it is theirs.

Coverage has edges. FoodByUs has a deep bench of Australian wholesale suppliers, but if your bespoke smallgoods maker or the farmer you buy direct from is not on the platform, that ordering stays manual, and your VA runs it manually alongside the platform work. One routine, two channels.

And it is a buying tool, not a kitchen system. It will not plan production, track wastage on the pans, or count your coolroom. It tells you what you bought and what it cost, with unusual clarity. What the kitchen does with the food after the driver leaves is a different problem, solved by different tools and, mostly, by your chef.

What stays with you

Hospitality buying is not a licensed profession, but the judgement in it is still yours and we keep it that way. The VA never decides which suppliers you use; they surface comparisons and you choose. Menu prices and margin targets are your calls; the VA reports against them. Payment methods on file, supplier credit terms and anything that authorises money leaving the business stay under your login, because a VA preparing and reconciling accounts payable is not a VA releasing payments, ever. Supplier relationships that turn commercial, renegotiating terms, ending a relationship, escalate to you with the delivery-and-credit history attached rather than being improvised in your name. The VA runs the buying machine. You stay the buyer.

What it costs and where to start

FoodByUs work sits squarely on DotVA’s admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most single venues land at 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, spread across the order run, daily invoice review, credit follow-up and the weekly price note; multi-venue groups need more, and the marketplace comparison work scales well across sites. If the same person is carrying your complete books rather than just the FoodByUs-to-Xero handover, that is the bookkeeping tier at $25-35 and we will say so up front rather than let it creep.

From discovery call to a working VA is 7-10 business days, and the first 5-7 of those are supervised inside your own FoodByUs account, starting on the order run and the invoice queue because that is where a mistake costs produce. Nothing goes solo until you sign off. Behind the match sits a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, a $500 refundable deposit that comes off your first month, and a 14-day notice period instead of a contract.

The hospitality virtual assistant page shows what a VA covers across a venue beyond purchasing, the data entry page covers the unglamorous discipline underneath all of this, and the VA cost guide lays out the whole pricing model. When you are ready, book a discovery call. Jenn takes every call herself, has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024, and will tell you plainly if your supplier count does not justify the hours. Bring last month’s invoices and your current credit backlog; those two piles usually settle the question inside twenty minutes.