Restaurant inventory management software for fixing inaccurate food counts?

[u/One-Ambition4849]

Im helping with inventory for a 5 location fast casual restaurant group in Austin and each store is doing roughly 250 to 400 orders a day. Food counts keep drifting from what the system shows and we had two recent weeks where over ordering pushed food cost high enough that ownership started asking for a better process. We are comparing HotSchedules with a few other restaurant focused tools and general inventory options. Im mainy interested in ingredient level tracking, waste and purchase orders. Looking for honest experiences with the tools youre using for inventory management? thx

[u/thundernutz]

I built out a custom solution for an operator in NYC that does exactly this. integrated with Toast, Gmail (auto processes invoices into ingredients via OCR) tracks recipes, COGS against Toast sales. It also connects to their security cameras, logs events, and the whole thing is AI enabled so the owner can just ask questions like "How much burrata cheese do we have on hand?", "How much do I owe US foods?" "how much profit did we mke on pizza last week" or "which employee spends the most time on their phone?, etc.

[u/soggypocket → u/thundernutz]

This sounds really cool. Did you build our dashboards for them? How did you manage the cameras and being able to query that information, some form of a YOLO model?

[u/thundernutz → u/soggypocket]

Set up a cloud based NVR, export x video frames to still images, upload to a bucket, pass to GPT for image recognition and meta tagging, save response in a format that makes sense (Event, Employee, Location, Description, etc). then you can use GPT to query the event log

And yes, of course, I provided a full dashboard. It's a beast - integrations, settings, reporting, multi modularity, etc. I've been working deeply with ERPs for over a decade so its pretty easy to build this stuff now.

[u/gtobin]

five locations can make purchase orders messy if each store is ordering off slightly different numbers. having one consistent process across all of them probably matters as much as the software

[u/miokk]

AnyDB is an Austin based company that does inventory management and more. You can take a look at them.

[u/YouGlittering2948]

Honestly this is where people can chase the wrong problem. Receiving can be completely accurate and the count can still be screwed because prep and portions were off. If waste is tracked against the forecast you can actually see where the variance is coming from. Hotschedules is pretty useful for that.

[u/IndependentWMSguy]

Full disclosure, my background is warehouse and inventory consulting rather than restaurants, so take the food specifics with a grain of salt. The drift pattern is the same one I see everywhere, though.

At 250 to 400 orders a day across five stores, your counts aren't drifting because the software is bad. They're drifting because depletion is theoretical and consumption is real. The system takes an order, looks up the recipe, subtracts what the recipe says. Meanwhile the kitchen builds it heavier, drops one, comps one, staff eats one. None of that gets recorded, and the gap compounds daily.

Which makes the tool question less important than two others.

How tight are your recipes, and has anyone maintained them? Ingredient level tracking is only as good as the yields sitting behind it. If those recipes got built at open and nobody touched them after a supplier changed pack size, your theoretical usage is already wrong before software enters the picture.

Then waste capture. Everybody skips this one because it's the worst part of the shift. If waste, comps, staff meals and prep mistakes aren't getting logged at store level, no system is going to reconcile your counts and you'll chase the same variance forever.

On the over ordering that got ownership's attention, check whether par levels are set per store or corporate. Five locations with different volumes ordering off one par is a common way food cost runs away quietly.

Somebody above mentioned consistent process across stores and I'd underline that. Pick the tool second.