C-Store Back Office Work Is 80% Nonsense — Here’s How to Cut It

I’ve been in this industry long enough to know one thing for certain: the back office will eat you alive if you let it.

When I started out, I thought managing stores was about keeping pumps running, keeping shelves stocked, and keeping customers happy. And it is — but you don’t get to do much of that when you’re buried under invoices and paperwork that seems to multiply when you’re not looking.

Most of the “work” in the back office isn’t real work. It’s typing. Renaming files. Shuffling stacks of paper from one pile to another. Printing out vendor invoices you already have on email so you can scan them back into your system. None of that grows your business. None of it keeps a single customer coming back.

That’s the 80%. The junk work. The part of your day that feels like quicksand.

The 20% — the good stuff — is where you actually make an impact. Looking at the numbers and seeing something’s off before it turns into shrink. Spotting when your vendor pricing has crept up and calling them out on it. Deciding how to schedule staff so you’re not overpaying during dead hours. That’s the part that makes you a better operator. But if you’re like me, you spend so much time doing the 80% that the 20% gets squeezed into whatever scraps of time are left. Usually at night, usually when you’re already too tired to think clearly.

That’s why I built FileMinder. I got sick of wasting hours on work that a machine should be doing for me. Playing with UPC scan sheets or typing line items off an invoice? A computer can read UPCs faster and more accurately than I ever will. Renaming files so they’re in the right folder? That’s not a skill, that’s punishment.

I wanted something simple: I scan or email an invoice, it lands in my Drive, and FileMinder does the rest. Totals, vendors, line items, even the EDI file my back-office wants — done automatically. No portals, no passwords, no “training videos.” Just done.

And when that 80% disappears, you feel it. You stop falling behind on reconciliation. You and your staff actually get to use your brain for the 20% that matters.

I can’t promise FileMinder will fix everything that’s broken about this industry. (If it could, I’d have built a time machine to make wholesalers adopt EDI twenty years ago.) But I can promise it’ll get rid of the hours you waste on back-office nonsense. The 80% that was never worth your time to begin with.

And once you see what your week looks like without that drag, you’ll wonder why you put up with it for so long.

⚡ We’ll process your first 50 pages free. That’s my way of saying: let us eat the paperwork. You focus on running your stores.