Payments That Reconcile Automatically, and a Catalog That Sells Itself

One Person Running Everything Means Every Admin Task Costs Real Money

West Michigan Deli Provisions is a Boar's Head brand purveyor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Owner Kyle Cushman has run the business as lean as possible with one warehouse, no admin staff, and Kyle handling sales, ordering, HR, and accounting himself.

That works, until the administrative load gets in the way of the actual job.

The biggest drain was accounts receivable. Customers received paper invoices on delivery and paid however and whenever they chose with no standard cadence. When a payment came in, Kyle had to log into his bank account, find the transaction, remote-desktop into Xtreme, open QuickBooks, and manually match the payment to an invoice. For ACH payers who consolidated multiple invoices into one payment, he often had to call the customer directly just to figure out what they were paying for.

That gap had real consequences. Kyle recounted one customer who had gone 22 weeks without paying: "The only reason I found out was he finally paid one week. I typed his name into QuickBooks and thought.. What? I hadn't been paid in 22 weeks. I can't prove a negative."

Credit card processing wasn't an option either. Because QuickBooks could only be accessed through Xtreme's remote desktop environment, Kyle had no path to connect a payment processor on his own.

Meanwhile, product information requests were a constant time sink. Boar's Head doesn't publish a customer-facing catalog. When a restaurant buyer wanted to add a new item (or needed nutritional information before putting something on their menu) they called Kyle. He'd then log into Boar's Head's single-sign-on portal, find the PDF, download it, update the customer's pricing, add the product to their order guide, and follow up. About 10 times a week.

As Kyle put it: "If I'm doing my job right, I'm not in front of a computer. If I'm in front of a computer, I'm not out there making money."

Finance Hub and Storefront Through Pepper's Xtreme Integration

Xtreme, the platform Boar's Head purveyors use to manage inventory and operations, introduced Kyle to Pepper as part of an early pilot group. He was immediately on board.

The implementation required almost nothing from his side. Pepper pulled in his customer list, pricing structure, and product catalog through the Extreme integration without Kyle having to configure or manage the data migration himself. When he downloaded the app after go-live, he was caught off guard.

"I was absolutely shocked when I downloaded that app and it worked. All my customers were there. All their prices were there. I did nothing. I was absolutely stunned."

He contrasted it with a previous ordering system implementation that had required four separate conference calls just to finalize a logo.

Payments That Reconcile Automatically, and a Catalog That Sells Itself

With Pepper's Finance Hub live, every customer payment, check, ACH, or credit card, is tied to an invoice automatically. The mystery ACH deposits that used to require a phone call to untangle now post and reconcile without Kyle's involvement. Credit card acceptance, previously impossible given his QuickBooks environment, is now enabled through Pepper's Extreme integration.

The 22-week blind spot Kyle described is no longer possible. Overdue accounts surface without him having to remember to check.

On the catalog side, customers now browse West Michigan Deli Provisions' full product line in the app. Photos, nutritional data, and item descriptions sourced through Pepper's SALT product content library. The ~10 weekly calls requesting product information or nutritional PDFs have stopped. Customers find what they need and add it themselves.

Off-order-guide purchases, items customers discover and order without Kyle's involvement, now account for 5–10% of order volume. Those are sales that previously would have required a call to Kyle, or wouldn't have happened at all.

The passwordless login removed a friction point for accounts where the primary owner isn't always the one placing the order. A manager or second-in-command can log in without credentials or a password reset.

Kyle is also preparing to run his first in-app promotions by discounting near-date overstocked items directly in the app, and plans to use the catalog as a sales tool on new prospect visits this summer. For the first time, he can show a prospective restaurant account exactly what West Michigan Deli Provisions carries without sending them to a website that doesn't exist.

"Boar's Head won't send me a catalog. It literally doesn't exist. So when a business owner says 'show me what you got,' now I say: here's the app. Every product we offer. Right here."

West Michigan Deli Provisions is a Boar's Head brand purveyor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, serving approximately 100 foodservice and deli accounts across the West Michigan region.