How Brown Foodservice Transformed AR with Pepper's Full Finance Stack

For most independent food distributors, accounts receivable is a department that runs on workarounds:Checks get scanned in one system, credit cards get processed in another, reconciliation happens in a spreadsheet, and somebody on the team is spending half their week just matching payments to invoices. 

Brown Foodservice serves the Appalachian market out of Louisa, Kentucky with a customer base heavy on mom-and-pop stores, many of them still paying by check. Their AR workflow had to handle everything from walk-in cash-and-carry transactions to weekly autopay batches, and doing that across multiple systems was costing them time they couldn't get back

In our recent webinar, Alvaro and Nick walked through the platform live alongside Brown Foodservice's financial controller Kevin Massey. Read more to see what they covered.

Pulling Payments, One Invoice at a Time

We opened with the most straightforward workflow in Finance Hub: pulling a payment manually through direct charge.

Alvaro demonstrated the core flow: looking up a customer, pulling their open invoices, selecting what to collect, and charging. One key detail that matters for AR teams: you don't have to collect the full invoice balance. If a customer owes $161 on an invoice and you want to collect $100 today, you can. Pepper posts the partial payment and carries the remaining balance forward automatically.

Another important detail Kevin pointed out: Brown assesses a fee on credit card payments but not on ACH or debit, and Pepper lets them configure that at the payment method level. Fees can be set as a flat dollar amount or a percentage, applied broadly or waived per customer.

Autopay: AR on Autopilot

Kevin named autopay as his favorite feature, and the logic is obvious from the controller's seat. Once a customer is enrolled, invoices get picked up and paid automatically based on their due dates. No follow-up calls, no chasing, no friction.

The setup is straightforward. AR teams create a frequency (daily, weekly on a specific day, monthly, etc.) and add customers to it. Every time the schedule runs, Pepper checks for open invoices due on or before that date, processes payment on whatever method the customer has on file, and posts the transaction to the ERP.

Brown keeps it simple: one or two autopay schedules covering their enrolled customers - But the flexibility goes deeper than that:

• Advanced settings allow autopay to trigger on order fulfillment date instead of invoice due date. 
• Weekly schedules can be configured to pick up invoices due through the previous week rather than just through the current day. 
• Credit memos with use-by dates are respected automatically (e.g. if a credit says "don't apply before June 1st," autopay will skip it until then).

The enrollment story is worth noting. Customers can self-select into autopay directly from the Pepper app, and the platform prompts them to enroll after every successful payment and after every statement payment. The adoption numbers from that nudge alone have surprised distributors who assumed customers wouldn't opt in voluntarily.

Check Scanning: Where Legacy Meets Modern

Alvaro also walked through the check scanning flow: Load checks into the scanner, hit Start Scan, and the device captures the batch. Back in Pepper, each check shows the payer's name and amount. You select the customer, and Pepper auto-assigns the check amount against the oldest open invoices - paying the first in full, applying the remainder to the next.

The system learns as you go. The first time you match a check from a specific payer to a customer account, Pepper remembers the association. Next time a check from that payer comes through, the match is suggested automatically.

Kevin highlighted a workflow for distributors with complex account structures: chain accounts. If a parent company writes a single check covering multiple sub-accounts, Pepper pulls up all the child accounts' invoices and lets you allocate across them from a single screen.

Before Pepper, Brown was splitting their check processing, running about three-quarters through their payment system and taking the rest to the bank. Now it all runs through one platform.

Live Statements: Because “You Can’t Pay from a PDF”

The traditional statement workflow in food distribution is well known and well hated. You generate a PDF, email it out, and wait. Half the time the customer says they never got it. The other half, it's in spam.

Pepper's live statements work differently. Like autopay, you set a frequency and assign customers. But what the customer receives isn't a static document, it's a link to a statement that updates in real time as invoices are synced from the distributor's system. Balances change, new invoices appear, credits get applied, and the statement always reflects the current state.

When a customer opens the statement, all invoices are pre-selected, a payment method is already loaded, and a Pay Now button is waiting. One tap to pay. Alvaro called this one of the fastest-growing payment types in Finance Hub, and given the zero-friction design, it's easy to see why.

The statement is also always available in the Pepper app, so even if the email goes to spam, the customer can pull it up anytime. Kevin confirmed this solves a problem he's been dealing with for years: the "I never got my statement" call that eats up AR time and delays collection.

Payout Reports: The Controller's Favorite View

Kevin made a point of calling out the daily payout reports, which is the CSV that hits his inbox every morning with every transaction from the previous day.

With transaction number, customer name, timestamp, charge amount, payout amount, invoice breakdown, fees, payment method, and more fields beyond what was shown in the webinar, the payout report is one of the most important data sources for AR teams. For Kevin, this is the resource that gives his team confidence that the numbers match, and the one that made manual reconciliation largely unnecessary.

Customer Applications and Credit Checks

The final feature we walked through was the customer application and Credit checks dashboard, a tool for onboarding new customers directly through Pepper. 

Distributors can send a customizable application form to prospects, collect the information needed to run a credit check, and view the results (score, delinquency rate, revolving credit line) right inside the platform. The form is flexible enough to include file uploads (a voided check, for example), and it's available today for any distributor on Finance Hub.

The Takeaway

Kevin summed it up simply: the platform is easy to use, adoption was fast — even among team members who've been at Brown for 20, 30, or 40 years — and the support from Pepper has been outstanding.

For distributors still splitting their AR across multiple systems, the message from this webinar was clear: Finance Hub isn't just a payment tool. It's the full AR workflow — direct charge, autopay, statements, check scanning, reporting, and customer onboarding — in one place, posting directly to your ERP.

‍