Islands Restaurants Automates Invoice Intake From Every Company-Owned Location Into NetSuite With Files.com

Islands opened its first restaurant in West Los Angeles in 1982, selling gourmet burgers and fresh-cut fries before the gourmet burger was a category. Four decades later, Islands Fine Burgers & Drinks runs roughly 40 full-service restaurants and bars across California and Arizona, with about 3,000 people working in them.

What makes Islands unusual at that size is that it has never franchised. Every location is company-owned and directly managed. There are no franchisees keeping their own books, which means the paperwork of every restaurant belongs to one corporate back office. Every invoice a location receives is corporate's to process.

An ERP in the Cloud, Invoices at the Stores

Islands runs that back office on NetSuite, a single cloud ERP at corporate. The documents NetSuite processes start somewhere else entirely: at the restaurants, where invoices arrive and get scanned, at every location, continuously.

When Islands deployed NetSuite, that gap was the problem. Between a scanner in a store and an ERP in the cloud, something has to carry the file, and the default something is a person. At the scale of dozens of restaurants generating paperwork every day, hand-carrying documents into an ERP is a standing labor cost. Islands designed the deployment so files would pass into NetSuite automatically instead, eliminating the need for corporate staff to collect and feed them into the ERP.

Building that channel in-house is real infrastructure work. It means an always-on SFTP endpoint reachable from every location, identity and accounts for the people submitting, and a reliable machine handoff into the ERP at the far end. A restaurant company can stand all of that up itself and then operate it indefinitely. But Islands' IT team was delivering an ERP rollout, not building a file-transfer platform.

What the deployment needed was a managed cloud SFTP endpoint that every restaurant could reach and NetSuite could consume, with identity coming from the Microsoft directory Islands already ran. Islands selected Files.com to be that layer.

SFTP From Every Restaurant, Service Accounts Into NetSuite

Islands' IT team deployed one consistent submission path across the chain. Each restaurant sent its scanned documents over SFTP to the same Files.com endpoint, no matter which store they came from.

Microsoft Entra ID supplied identity through the corporate SSO Islands already used, avoiding a separate list of file-transfer accounts for IT to maintain. On the ERP side, service accounts connected Files.com to NetSuite so documents could pass into the ERP for processing. The handoff was machine to machine.

From Store Scanner to ERP With Nobody in Between

With the pipeline in production, the store-to-corporate document flow runs the way it was designed to: automatically, end to end.

• Invoice intake runs without hands on it. A restaurant scans and submits, the document passes into NetSuite for processing, and nobody at corporate collects files or feeds them to the ERP by hand.
• Islands runs no file-transfer infrastructure of its own. There is no SFTP server for IT to operate and patch, and no integration middleware to maintain. Files.com is the endpoint the stores reach and the handoff NetSuite consumes.
• Access stays aligned with the company directory. With Entra ID SSO, an Islands account is the file account, with no separate set of credentials for IT to maintain.
• The pattern scales with the chain. A new restaurant is another submission point on the same endpoint, and nothing changes downstream. NetSuite keeps consuming from the same place.

Every Location a Submission Point

Because Islands never franchised, corporate carries the administration of every restaurant the company opens. What changed with Files.com is what that carrying costs. Someone at a store scans an invoice and their part is done; the file crosses to NetSuite on its own. The processing happens inside the ERP rather than in a pile of incoming documents.

Any multi-location operator putting a cloud ERP at the center of its back office faces the same gap between where documents originate and where they are processed. Islands closed it without building or operating its own file-transfer infrastructure: each location became a submission point, and Files.com does the carrying.