Toast IQ Inventory is currently in limited release with select customers. Check back soon for updates! |
About Toast IQ Inventory
Toast IQ Inventory is a real-time inventory platform built into Toast Web. It tracks the items your business stocks — retail goods, prepared food and beverage, ingredients, and supplies — and connects that stock to your sales, so your inventory levels and item costs update as you sell.
Because Toast IQ Inventory and Menu Manager read from the same underlying item data, you set an item up once. There is no mapping step between your menu and your inventory, and no second system to keep in sync.
What You Can Do With Toast IQ Inventory
See stock levels update in real time as sales deplete them
Build recipes that link menu items to ingredients, and see the cost and margin of each item you sell
Count physical stock and reconcile it against what the system expects
Create purchase orders, send them to suppliers, and receive against them
Capture supplier invoices by email, mobile scan, or web upload
Log waste against ingredients and prep items
Track allergens and dietary tags on the prepared food & beverage items you sell
Report on sales and cost of goods sold (COGS) together in one place
Requirements and Permissions
Toast IQ Inventory runs in Toast Web. No additional hardware is required, though a barcode scanner and a label printer are supported if you want to scan items during a count or print your own labels.
Permissions needed:
4.5 Edit Full Menu — to create and edit items, recipes, and count sheet templates
5.2 Inventory and Quantity — for staff who update inventory quantities through stock counts, manual adjustments, or purchase orders
Note: You do not need the Toast Retail module to use Toast IQ Inventory.
Who Can Use Toast IQ Inventory
Toast IQ Inventory is available to select customers in a limited release. It is designed for restaurants, retailers, and food service operators, including businesses that run both retail and restaurant operations from the same location.
How Toast IQ Inventory Works
Item types
Every item you create in Toast IQ Inventory is one of four types: Retail, Prepared food and beverage, Ingredient, or Supply. Only prepared food and beverage items can have a recipe. Retail items are depleted directly when they sell, because they are sold as they are.
Theoretical stock and physical counts
Toast IQ Inventory calculates how much of an item should be on hand. That figure starts from your most recent stock count, increases when you receive stock or make a manual adjustment, and decreases with sales, waste, and transfers out.
This calculated figure is theoretical — it is what the system expects, not what has been physically verified. A stock count is how you verify and correct it. When a count is approved, Toast IQ Inventory sets the on-hand quantity of every counted item to the quantity you physically counted, and all later calculations run from that new baseline.
Recipes and depletion
A recipe links a menu item to the ingredients it consumes. When a menu item with a recipe sells, Toast IQ Inventory depletes each ingredient by the quantity the recipe specifies. Stock lives in the ingredients rather than in the finished menu item.
Depletion happens across every ordering channel — Toast POS, online ordering, kiosk, and catering & events — and inventory is decremented at the moment the order fires to the kitchen.
For items prepared in bulk ahead of service, such as sauces, stocks, and doughs, batch prep mode holds stock at the prepared item level instead. You record production, which consumes the ingredients and creates a quantity of the finished batch item.
Costing
Inventory cost for items you stock track is calculated on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis, so the earliest stock you received is consumed first, and the cost of goods is traceable down to each individual sale and the inventory lot it drew from. An item cost can be defined for items you do not stock track, so every sale returns a cost of goods, either way.
Plate cost is the total cost of all ingredients in a recipe at their current unit costs, and margin is calculated as the difference between the plate cost and the item's selling price. Ingredients do not have to be measured in the unit you purchase them in — Toast IQ Inventory converts between units, and stores the conversion on the ingredient so it applies everywhere that ingredient is used.
Reporting
Toast IQ Inventory includes three reports that bring sales and inventory data together: Sales & COGS, Inventory Snapshot, and Inventory Roll Forward.
Change history
Toast IQ Inventory records who changed an item, when they changed it, and which surface the change came from, so you can trace an unexpected number back to the change that caused it.
Known Limitations
These capabilities are not available in the current release:
Modifier selections impacting inventory calculations. Any modifications selected on the order will have no impact on the COGS or inventory depletion of impacted items.
Editing more complex pricing strategies like location-specific and time-specific pricing in the Toast IQ Inventory interface. These prices are still honored in every margin and reporting calculation; set them in the menu manager.
Automated restock to par level. You can set par minimum and par maximum values, and par-based workflows are supported for sellable items, but not yet supported for ingredients and supplies
Stock tracking on prep recipes. You can nest recipes within each other to make recipes easier, and soon you will be able to track stock on any batch-prepped recipes.
Visibility into stock committed to future or catering orders. Because inventory decrements when an order fires, preordered quantities are not reflected in your on-hand count until the order fires
Linking inventory of similar items – eventually, you will be able to link the inventory of multiple sellable items that deplete the same pool of inventory, like a bottle of wine and a glass of wine.
Note: Allergen tags are available, but the allergen list itself cannot be customized. Allergen labeling is legally regulated, so the list is fixed and varies by country. Dietary tags allow you to flag common search attributes that are not regulated allergens (e.g., Vegan, Vegetarian)
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