A Paperless Vision

Patrick Albrecht runs Great Food Group, Inc., a successful and growing Atlanta-based restaurant group. He uses Evernote to run three busy restaurants (Paul’s, Social Vinings and The Vinings Fish Company) and manage a distributed staff of 160. Patrick’s team uses Evernote for everything from communicating around menu planning and maintenance needs to accounting and training, on any device, on the go.

Great Food Group, Inc.

Small Business Case Study

managers and the group’s accountant

(as well as Patrick) are able view all

of the invoices for all of the

restaurants, review and archive them

in one place. Evernote provides both

Patrick and the group’s account with

a holistic view of finances.

Communication with Off-Site Employees:Patrick no longer has to use email to

communicate with off-site employees.

He simply tags notes to drop into

shared Evernote notebooks. Employees

check these notebooks to learn about

daily tasks.

Accounting:Invoices and credit card receipts are

labeled and automatically scanned

into Evernote. With a Premium

account, every invoice can be searched

by text and accessed on any mobile

device or laptop, by any Premium

account holder.

Training and HR:New hire documentation and training

manuals can be kept in Evernote

to make sure that all paperwork is

up to date and training processes are

kept uniform, across locations.

Large-Scale Project Planning and Execution:Multi-task projects can be managed

and collaborated on inside Evernote.

Users and groups can catalog every

step of any given project, from meeting

notes (text and audio) and research,

to development and completion.

Text-Free Time Savers:Contracts, business cards, and supplies

like light bulbs and furniture can be

photographed or scanned and stored

in Evernote for instant reference—

no attachments or tags needed.

Evernote makes all of this content

completely searchable, even finding

text within images. Notes can also

easily be shared with multiple users

via email or shared notebooks.

Deploying Evernote Across the Business

To deploy Evernote in a business

environment, Patrick took advantage

of Sponsored Groups, which allowed

him to pay for all of Great Food

Group Inc.’s employee accounts from

one bill and gave all employees the

benefits of Evernote Premium.

Getting More out of Evernote: The Trunk

Evernote is compatible with many

everyday office products such as

scanners, digital cameras, smartpens,

and mobile applications. Products like

the Fujitsu ScanSnap can automatically

send electronic documents into

Evernote, making accounting a snap.

Before Evernote, Patrick Albrecht

and his team conducted many

business processes manually:

an off-site accountant would travel

to each restaurant location to collect

invoices for later review. New hire

paperwork would fill filing cabinets

across different locations, and

repair needs would be emailed to

a handyman individually. The paper

trail was endless.

The concept of a central,

searchable, device-agnostic archive

of all business-related documents

was inconceivable. But Patrick had a

vision: a paperless business—one that

would free him and his colleagues

from the massive inconvenience

of managing an enormous amount

of paperwork both at their offices,

as well as at their homes.

A Personal Discovery of Evernote

After downloading Evernote, Patrick

quickly saw how powerful it could

be as a business tool. He started

to think: How could he manage his

multiple restaurants without archaic

systems like email and wiki pages?

How could he reduce the amount

of paper he and his employees handled

on a daily basis? And how could he

get all of his employees on board?

Bringing Evernote Into Small Business

Patrick was looking for a solution

that would be flexible, easy to use and

easy to implement.

His first step in a wide Evernote

deployment was to provide restaurant

managers, the restaurants’ accountant,

repairman, and himself with Premium

Accounts. In doing so, he was able

to streamline an extraordinary

amount of business processes. With

the help of Evernote, Great Food Group,

Inc. employees can communicate with

each other, keep track of all invoices

for accounting purposes, streamline

the hiring and training processes, and

even communicate with maintenance

staff regarding repair needs.

Business Implementations with Evernote

Patrick has found Evernote to be an

extremely easy-to-deploy, flexible

and simple solution for a number

of business functions. Here are some

of the ways that Evernote works in

a small business environment:

Staff Collaboration:Every location manager is able to

update Patrick with happenings

of the day, which he can review

on his laptop or iPhone immediately,

even when he’s offline. By typing

in keywords, he is able to see recurring

instances or issues that come up

and quickly resolve them. Because

each note is date and time stamped

automatically, Patrick is able to

create a visual timeline of events

that need his attention.

Workflow:Patrick has structured his business’s

Evernote accounts so that they create

a streamlined workflow. Managers

of all of the restaurants, as well as the

group’s accountant, all have Premium

accounts and are granted access

to selected notebooks associated with

individual restaurants. High-level

“We put everything into Evernote and the invoices just go in the trash. I don’t need to store them anymore. I have a digital copy of everything that comes through the restaurant.”

Patrick Albrecht, Restauranteur, Owner of Great Food Group Inc.

As with any small business, a restaurant is a complex operation: thousands of invoices with hundreds of itemizations, constant maintenance and repair needs, staff training, management and hiring, and split minute decision-making.

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Results

Evernote allows Patrick to share

information with any member of his

staff instantaneously, no matter where

they are or what they device they

may be using. For a small business,

finding information is as important as

sharing it. Whether he’s trying to find

a specific item on an invoice on his

iPhone, clipping kitchen equipment

from the web for price comparison

purposes or reviewing his staff’s daily

recaps, Patrick relies on Evernote to

keep his businesses running smoothly.

For Great Food Group, Inc.,

Evernote has become an invaluable

business partner. Documents that

would otherwise take up multiple

filing cabinets and be locally stored

on computers in multiple locations

now live in Evernote, accessible

at a moment’s notice on an iPhone,

Android, Blackberry, iPad, Windows

PC, Mac, iPod Touch, HP Palm, and

numerous other devices.

Evernote has helped save time

associated with document pick-up,

delivery and processing but more

importantly, it has fundamentally

changed the way that Patrick and

his employees think about their

businesses, collaboration, workflow,

communication and paper.

Evernote’s flexibility has

empowered employees to come up

with new and unique ways to leverage

its utility. For example, employees

now use Evernote for daily, shared

updates–a process that has become

a routine. Evernote rewired the way

that staff at all levels think about

the traditional business workflow.

With Evernote, employees are better

informed, processes are more

efficient, management is more tuned

into operations across locations

and Great Food Group, Inc. is realizing

its mission to become a completely

paper-free business.

Key Features

Shared Notebooks with read/edit rights:For collaboration by multiple team

members (Premium)

Offline note access:For anytime access on iPhone, iPad,

iPod, Android (Premium)

PDF attachment and synchronization:For invoices, credit card bills,

new hire documentation,

and training manuals

File storage:For accessing Word, PPT, Excel files

from anywhere

Image capture and synchronization:For project planning, repairs,

and text-free time savers

Search within scanned PDFs:For maintaining a centralized,

searchable accounting system

(Premium)

Text and audio notes:For recording meetings with

contractors and team members

“At the rate we’re going, we’re well on our way to becoming an entirely paperless business.” Patrick Albrecht

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To learn more about Sponsored Groups and how your business can get started with Evernote, please contact group-accounts@evernote.com.