Back-of-House Ops

Live stock counts. Auto-drafted POs. Vendor scorecards.

Live counts of every ingredient, bottle, keg, and paper good. Purchase orders, receiving, price history, and vendor performance scoring. Recipes deplete stock on the fly as tickets fire on the KDS, so on-hand numbers are always right, not "right as of last Wednesday."

I
Prep cook in white chef coat scanning inventory on a rugged tablet inside an organized walk-in cooler stocked with fresh produce, warm industrial pendant lighting.
Back of house. Live stock in the walk-in. One scan updates every station.
What it does

Nine capabilities. One module.

Every capability listed below is included in the base module. No add-ons, no unlock fees, no per-seat surcharges. If you're on xRESTAURANTx, you have this.

1

Recipe-level depletion

Every menu item has a recipe. When the ticket fires on the KDS, every ingredient in that recipe subtracts from stock in real time. No week-end guessing, no manual counts to reconcile.

2

Par levels & low-stock alerts

Set par by SKU, per day of week, per season. When on-hand drops below par, the alert fires, and the PO gets drafted automatically to the preferred vendor.

3

Purchase order drafts

POs draft automatically from par breaches or forecast shortfalls. A manager reviews, adjusts, and sends. Repetitive staples can be flipped to auto-send so you never run out of pickle chips on a Saturday.

4

Receiving reconciliation

Delivery arrives, staff scans invoice or types PO number, system auto-matches line items. Short-ships, substitutions, and price variances get flagged before the invoice is marked paid.

5

Price variance flags

Every incoming invoice is compared against the last N deliveries for that item. Price up more than your threshold? It gets flagged for review. Vendors quietly walking prices up is a common margin killer, and this stops it.

6

Vendor scorecards

On-time percentage, price stability, quality complaints, short-ship rate. Vendors get an objective grade you can share with them or use to switch suppliers when performance slips.

7

Multi-location transfers

Move stock between your locations in one screen. Both sides update in real time. Full audit trail of who transferred what, when, and why.

8

Waste & spoilage tracking

Two-tap waste logging: item, quantity, reason. Waste rolls into food-cost analytics separately from sold quantity so you can see exactly where margin is leaking.

9

Invoice OCR + PO auto-match

Snap a photo of a paper invoice or upload a PDF. The system extracts vendor, date, line items, and prices, then auto-matches to the open PO. Anything that doesn't match cleanly is surfaced for review.

Tutorial

How to use it. Step by step.

Every operator we onboard runs this same tutorial in their first week. Most complete it in one sit-down; the whole team is comfortable inside three shifts.

01

Load your recipe book

Every menu item gets a recipe: ingredients, quantities, unit of measure. This is what allows the system to deplete stock automatically on ticket fire.

💡 Start with your top 20 sellers. Those 20 recipes cover roughly 80 percent of your production. You can add the long tail over the next few weeks.
02

Set par levels per item

For each SKU, set the minimum on-hand you want to see before an alert fires. Par can differ by day of week, by season, or by service.

💡 Par is not average usage. Par is "the amount below which I never want to fall." A common rule: set par at 1.5x your average day, or 2x your busiest day, whichever is lower.
03

Connect your vendors

Add each vendor with their catalog, pricing, and lead time. The system then knows who to draft the PO to when a par level is breached.

💡 Every SKU can have a preferred vendor AND a backup. When the preferred vendor is out of stock or slow, the backup catches the shortfall.
04

Turn on receiving

When a delivery arrives, staff scans the invoice or types the PO number. The system auto-matches line items and flags any price variance or short-ship.

05

Review the vendor scorecard weekly

Once a week, spend five minutes on the scorecard: on-time percentage, price stability, quality complaints, short-ship rate. Vendors get an objective grade.

💡 Share the scorecard with your reps. Most vendors will fix a slipping metric the moment they see it in writing. The ones that don't are the ones you should replace.

Included in every deployment.

xRESTAURANTx modules are not sold separately. Bundle everything, you pay one flat rate keyed to your restaurant's size, not a per-module upsell.

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Use cases

Where this module earns its keep.

Concrete scenarios from actual operators using the module in production. Every scenario carries a metric or a mechanism, not a marketing slogan.

Fine dining, the 86 report before service FINE DINING

Chef pulls the 86 report at 4 PM. Every dish that can't be fired tonight is already flagged because a key ingredient dropped below the recipe threshold. Servers are briefed before doors open, so no guest hears "86" at the table.

  • Recipe-level depletion means the 86 list is live, not estimated
  • Alerts fire the moment an ingredient can't cover one more plate
  • Server training module can push the 86 list to every device in the dining room
FINE DINING

Fast casual, auto-reorder at 20 percent of par FAST CASUAL

Fast casual runs on velocity. When any SKU hits 20 percent of par, the system auto-drafts the PO and sends it to the preferred vendor without waiting for a manager. Manager gets a summary text at end of shift.

  • Zero-touch reorder for staples the operator never wants to run out of
  • Manager approval required only for non-staple items or above a dollar threshold
  • Every auto-sent PO is auditable, reversible, and shows up in the daily digest
FAST CASUAL

Franchise, cross-location transfer instead of emergency order FRANCHISE

Downtown location is out of the seasonal special sauce; the airport location has three cases sitting. One tap moves two cases to downtown. Delivery driver swings by on the next route. No emergency vendor call, no expedited freight charge.

  • Multi-location on-hand visible to every unit's manager
  • Transfer request creates a paper trail on both sides
  • Cost accounting stays clean, the sending location's food cost adjusts, the receiving location's ingredient cost adjusts
FRANCHISE

Ghost kitchen, per-brand recipe cost tracking GHOST KITCHEN

The same chicken sandwich lives in three virtual brands with three different prices. The recipe cost is the same across all three; the margin is different. Per-brand analytics show which brand is actually profitable at current ingredient prices.

  • Recipe cost updates automatically when an ingredient price changes
  • Per-brand margin recomputes on the fly
  • Operator sees exactly which brand to raise prices on and which to double down on
GHOST KITCHEN
FAQ

Answers before you have to ask.

How does recipe-level depletion actually work?

Each menu item has a recipe attached. The instant a ticket fires on the KDS, the system subtracts every ingredient in that recipe from on-hand stock. If you sold 40 burgers, you burned 40 buns, 10 pounds of beef, 40 slices of cheese, and so on. No end-of-week guesswork.

What happens when a par level is breached?

The system drafts a purchase order to the preferred vendor for that item, sized to bring stock back to par plus your buffer. A manager reviews it, adjusts if needed, and clicks send. Or you can set auto-send for staples where you never want to run out.

Can I run inventory across multiple locations?

Yes. Every SKU has a per-location on-hand count. Transfers between locations are one screen: pick the item, pick the source, pick the destination, hit send. Both sides update in real time, with an audit trail.

Does it handle price variance from vendors?

Yes. Every receiving event compares the invoice price against the last N invoices. If the price is up more than a threshold you set (default 5 percent), it gets flagged for review before the invoice can be marked paid.

How does the invoice OCR work?

Snap a photo or upload a PDF of the paper invoice. The system extracts vendor, date, line items, quantities, and prices, then auto-matches to the open PO. Anything that doesn't match cleanly is surfaced for staff review, so you never miss a short-ship or a price hike.

Can I track waste and spoilage separately from usage?

Yes. The waste log is a two-tap entry: item, quantity, reason (spoiled, dropped, comp'd, prep error). Waste rolls into food-cost analytics separately from sold quantity, so you can see exactly where your margin is leaking.

What if my vendor doesn't have a digital catalog?

You can enter their catalog manually the first time, or upload a spreadsheet, or take a photo of their price sheet and let OCR pull it in. After that, POs generate automatically. Small local vendors rarely have an API, and that's fine.

Related modules

Modules that pair naturally.

xRESTAURANTx modules are designed to work together. These three are the ones most operators use alongside Inventory & Vendor Management.

Free to reprint.

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Ready to see it running?

Book a 20-minute demo. We'll walk through Inventory & Vendor Management on your actual menu and vendor list, and show you how it lands on the floor.

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