Craftable, the Dallas-based back-office technology provider, will exhibit its AI-powered procure-to-pay platform at HITEC 2026, positioning the tool as an end-to-end operating system for multi-unit restaurant and hospitality groups looking to compress overhead and tighten financial controls.
The platform consolidates purchasing, inventory management, invoice processing, accounting, payment execution, and analytics into a unified stack. For operators running tight unit economics — where food and beverage costs routinely absorb 28% to 35% of revenue — automating the procure-to-pay cycle is increasingly framed as a direct lever on store-level margin rather than a back-office convenience.
Craftable's pitch lands at a moment when operators across the QSR and full-service segments are under sustained pressure from elevated input costs and a labor market that has kept back-of-house wages structurally higher than pre-pandemic baselines. Manual invoice reconciliation and fragmented purchasing workflows remain a common source of cost leakage, particularly for franchisee groups managing area development agreements across dozens of units. Automated procure-to-pay systems that flag vendor pricing discrepancies and enforce compliance at the purchase-order level are increasingly part of the technology stack that multi-unit operators present to potential franchisees as a unit-economics differentiator.
The broader hospitality technology sector has seen accelerating vendor consolidation as operators demand fewer integration points, and platforms that connect front-of-house revenue data with back-of-house cost data are gaining traction among both independent groups and asset-light franchise systems. Craftable's expansion into AI-assisted analytics — surfacing anomalies in spend or inventory variance — aligns with what procurement and finance teams at larger chains have built internally for years but which has historically been out of reach for operators below the enterprise tier.
HITEC 2026, the annual hospitality technology conference, serves as a primary showcase for vendors targeting hotel and foodservice technology buyers, making it a logical venue for Craftable to engage both the lodging and restaurant sides of its operator base. The company did not disclose current customer unit counts, AUV impact data, or pricing tiers ahead of the show.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
