Craddock Oil Company operates 49 convenience stores and retail fuel locations across Mississippi under the BlueSky brand and has been a Fintech client for years. Like many operators in the convenience channel, they came to Fintech for automated beer invoice payments, and the relationship quickly became one they counted on.
But as their business grew, so did the complexity of managing vendor invoices across the rest of their vendor portfolio. Non-alcohol vendors, from snack and frozen food distributors to one-off suppliers like ice and propane, meant juggling multiple file formats, separate FTP portals, and manual reconciliation processes that ate into their team’s time and energy.
When Fintech introduced PaymentSource® Premium, expanding invoice data processing beyond alcohol to all non-alcohol vendors, Craddock Oil was ready to take the next step.
Craddock Oil had made a genuine effort to manage EDI invoice processing in-house. For a company their size, that took real commitment. But as their vendor roster grew and the complexities of EDI multiplied, the cracks started to show.
The core problem was that every vendor had its own way of doing things.
One-off vendors, like ice suppliers or propane distributors, weren’t on EDI at all. Craddock Oil had never thought to put them there.
What they needed wasn’t just another tool. They needed a partner who could take the complexity off their plate entirely, bring their vendors into alignment, and give them the same confidence on the non-alcohol side that they’d had on beer for years.
Craddock Oil came to Fintech with a targeted list of non-alcohol vendors they wanted to onboard for EDI invoice delivery. The goal was to get these vendors connected, consolidate everything through one platform, and eliminate the patchwork of portals and manual processes that were slowing their team down.
The transition was straightforward because every vendor on their list was already in Fintech’s network.
That meant no cold outreach, no waiting on vendor IT teams to get up to speed, and no delays negotiating file formats from scratch. Fintech handled the coordination between Craddock Oil and each vendor to align on delivery specs, file formats, and routing, so Craddock Oil’s team didn’t have to be the middleman.
“You fill out a spreadsheet with your points of contact and customer reps, and Fintech handles it from there — getting people to talk about EDI, where the files are, what format they’re in. You’re not the one trying to get two companies to talk to each other.” – Dwayne Temple, Office Manager and CFO
The onboarding process was supported by weekly check-in meetings that kept the team informed and on track throughout implementation.
With everything routing through Fintech, Craddock Oil also discovered something they hadn’t anticipated. Vendors they never would have considered putting on EDI invoicing, like their ice supplier and propane distributor, were now part of the program. Fintech made the onboarding simple enough that even one-off vendors were worth including.
Since making the switch to PaymentSource Premium for non-alcohol invoice data processing, Craddock Oil has seen meaningful improvements across their operations with time savings and more efficient processes across store locations.
Time Savings Across the Team
The hours their team spent logging into separate FTP portals to retrieve vendor files are gone. Everything flows through one destination. The price book team no longer bounces between eight different sites. It all comes through Fintech.
Fewer Manual Processes at the Store Level
When an item isn’t in the price book, it shows up as an error, and that error is actually a signal. It means a product is on the shelf but not scanning at the register. Catching and correcting those gaps is something a store manager juggling dozens of daily priorities can’t reliably track. Now, those issues surface automatically.
Reliability They Can Count On
For Craddock Oil, the biggest benefit isn’t any single feature. It’s knowing the files are there, every day, without having to check.
A Relationship That’s Proven Itself Twice Over
Craddock Oil’s experience with Fintech has now reshaped how they operate on two separate occasions. First with automated invoice payment processing for beer, and now with EDI invoice data for their non-alcohol vendors.
Craddock Oil didn’t set out to overhaul how they manage vendors. They set out to solve specific problems with too many portals, too many formats, and too much riding on one person’s knowledge. What they found was a partner willing to take that problem off their plate entirely, vendor by vendor, without asking Craddock Oil’s team to manage the handoffs.
EDI onboarding used to be something Craddock Oil avoided unless a vendor forced the issue. Now it’s simple enough that even their ice supplier is on it. As Craddock Oil adds vendors or opens new locations, that same process is already in place, ready to absorb whatever comes next.
Two systems, one standard. For Craddock Oil, that’s what a partnership with Fintech looks like.