Chef’s Roll provides an online community for culinary professionals worldwide, from the line cook all the way up to Michelin star chefs. In addition to being the “LinkedIn for chefs”, Chef’s Roll strives to educate members. The Chef’s Roll production team creates content like Chef’s Plate, Dear Chef, and live events like Center Stage - all sponsored by food producers large and small.
“My co-founder and I saw a gap in the online presence of chefs worldwide”, said Thomas Keslinke, co-founder and CEO of Chef’s Roll. “Chef’s Roll was born out of a desire to solve this problem.”
Initially Chef’s Roll was open only to one specific role type (chefs) and members had to pay to create a basic profile. “That quickly changed,” admitted Keslinke.
Chef’s Roll opened the platform up to all culinary professionals, mimicking LinkedIn’s structure: basic profiles are complimentary, while more robust profile features require either a subscription fee or an upfront payment. In addition, Chef’s Roll has a separate fee structure for food companies that want to sponsor educational content for members.
Before launching Invoiced, Chef’s Roll was creating customer invoices in Microsoft Word. This process involved manually updating the invoice number, client information, and fees charged. Invoices were sent out via email, making it difficult to have any oversight.
Chef’s Roll founders Thomas Keslinke and Franz van der Lee began searching for a solution that simplify their existing invoicing process. “Invoiced worked best for us,” said Keslinke.
Upon launching Invoiced, Chef’s Roll found a new level of visibility into invoicing. They can now easily see what each client was charged and how much they owe - without searching through mountains of email. They can also offer clients the opportunity to pay upfront or per month, and see multiple payments made against any invoice.
Not only that - a whole host of other features make their lives easier. Chef’s Roll creates customer profiles and is then able to type one letter and pull up a client’s information. And they frequently make use of the pre-populated email reminders.
With the change from a manual process to Invoiced, Chef’s Roll is saving 5-6 hours a week on invoicing tasks.
“Invoiced created peace of mind - just in having our invoicing data readily available,” said Keslinke. “It has changed the way we do business.”
