Know your true food cost — by location, by period, by plate.
SmartOPS Margin connects counts, purchasing, invoices and recipes into one costing engine, so multi-unit operators find the leak while there's still a period left to fix it.
Guided implementation · Works alongside your POS and accounting
No spreadsheet handoffs between steps
Yields, sub-recipes and live vendor pricing
Not a surprise at period close
Locations, roles, permissions, audit trail
Most groups don't have a cost problem. They have a cost visibility problem.
Counts live in a spreadsheet, purchasing lives in vendor portals, invoices live in a folder, and recipes were last costed two price increases ago. By the time the number lands, the period is closed.
The number arrives too late
Food cost gets calculated after close, by an accountant, from three sources that never quite agree. Nobody can act on it.
Nobody can explain the gap
You know cost went up 2 points. You don't know whether it was vendor pricing, portioning, waste, theft or a bad count — so you guess.
Every location does it differently
Different count sheets, different order guides, different UOMs. Location comparison becomes an argument instead of a decision.
One closed cost loop, from the walk-in to the P&L
Every step writes to the same ledger, so the number at the end is traceable back to the person, item and moment that created it.
Mobile counts by storage area, offline-capable
Par-driven POs against real vendor pricing
Invoice capture and three-way match
Recipes, yields, batches and transfers
POS sales mapped to recipes and plate cost
Variance, prime cost and menu actions
Counting that people actually finish
Templates by storage area, par-aware sheets, unit-of-measure guardrails and an offline-first mobile flow. Submit for review, then post to the ledger.
- Count templates per location and storage area
- Barcode/QR scan, par hints and last-count reference
- Review and approval before anything hits cost
- Waste and spoilage logged against the same items
Buy at the price you agreed to
Order guides per location, par-suggested quantities, vendor price comparison and alerts the moment a contract price moves.
- Vendor catalogs with per-location order guides
- Price-change alerts tied to affected recipes
- Side-by-side vendor comparison before you send
- Suppliers confirm POs by link — no portal logins
Three-way match, then straight to accounting
Capture the invoice, match it to the PO and the receipt, route the exceptions, and export clean entries to your GL.
- Invoice capture with line-level extraction
- PO / receipt / invoice matching with exception queues
- Approvals, AP aging and vendor credit tracking
- GL mapping and accounting export
Everything that drives food and beverage cost
Deep where operators need depth, connected everywhere else.
Inventory & counts
- Item master and UOM health
- Count templates and mobile counts
- Par levels by location
- Ledger, transfers and waste
Purchasing & vendors
- Vendor catalogs and order guides
- PO builder with par suggestions
- Price-change alerts
- Vendor comparison
Invoices & AP
- Invoice capture
- Three-way matching
- Approvals and AP aging
- Accounting export
Recipes & menu
- Recipe costing with yields
- Sub-recipes and batches
- Menu engineering
- Price optimizer
Cost & variance reporting
- Period COGS by category
- Actual vs theoretical
- Labor, expenses and budgets
- Prime cost
Insights & AI Copilot
- Dashboards and report catalog
- Custom report builder
- Scheduled exports
- Ask-anything Copilot
From a Tuesday count to a decision the same week
Variance is broken down to the category, item and location that caused it — then explained in plain language.
Airport ran 31.6% food cost vs 28.4% group average. Three drivers explain $4,910 of the $5,190 gap:
- • Beef variance $3,120 — 214 lb used above theoretical, concentrated on ribeye.
- • Ribeye vendor price +11.4% from Sysco effective Mar 3 ($1,140).
- • Dairy count variance $650 — walk-in count submitted 2 days late.
High volume, margin down $0.86. Price to $39.50 to hold contribution.
Every price increase reaches the plate
When a vendor price moves, Margin re-costs every recipe that uses the item and flags the menu items whose margin just changed.
- Plate cost updated from live purchase prices
- Yield and waste factors applied per ingredient
- Menu engineering quadrants by contribution and volume
- Price optimizer with target margin scenarios
Add production and distribution when you're ready
Commissary and Logistics turn a central kitchen into a costed, routed operation — switched on per group, not rebuilt.
Commissary
Produce once, distribute everywhere — with the cost following the food.
- Published catalog and store order guides
- Batch production at true cost
- Transfers that post both sides
- Fulfillment and short-pick variance
Logistics
Get the order on the truck, to the door, and proven delivered.
- Runs built from fulfilled orders
- Offline-first driver app
- Proof of delivery with GPS and timestamps
- Vehicle mileage and run history
Configured with you — not handed over as a login
Most cost systems fail on setup: bad item masters, mismatched UOMs, uncosted recipes. We do that work with your team.
- 01
Digitize the foundation
Item master, units of measure, vendor catalogs, order guides and locations built and validated with data-health checks.
- 02
Cost the menu
Recipes, sub-recipes and yields entered and reconciled against real purchase history and POS sales mix.
- 03
Run a live period
First counts, first POs, first close — side by side with your current process until the numbers agree.
Work in Margin. Decide in SmartOPS OS.
Margin owns the cost detail. Cost signals roll up into the wider SmartOPS OS — location profiles, tasks and leadership reporting — without exposing every vendor price to every user.
- Cost tiles on each location profile in the OS
- Cost anomalies become assigned, tracked work
- Role-scoped visibility across the suite
- One identity, one implementation team
Sales mapped to recipes for theoretical usage
Mapped entries, no re-keying
Order guides kept current
Cost visible where leadership works
What operators ask us first
How is this different from an inventory app?+
Inventory apps stop at what's on the shelf. Margin carries the cost forward: counts feed usage, usage meets recipes and sales to produce theoretical cost, and the gap against actual purchases becomes variance you can assign to a category, item and location.
Do we have to replace our POS or accounting system?+
No. Margin sits between them. Sales and menu mix come in from your POS; mapped journal entries go out to your accounting system.
Our recipes have never been costed. Is that a blocker?+
It's the normal starting point. Costing the menu is part of implementation — we build recipes, yields and sub-recipes with your chefs and reconcile them against real purchase history.
Will store-level staff actually use it?+
The parts they touch — counts, receiving, orders, waste — are mobile-first, offline-capable and short. Everything heavier lives with above-store roles.
Can we control who sees pricing?+
Yes. Roles and permissions are granular, location access is scoped per user, and every change is written to an audit log.
Do we need the Commissary module?+
Only if you produce centrally. Groups without a central kitchen run Margin's core stack; Commissary and Logistics can be switched on later.
See your true food cost in a 30-minute walkthrough
We'll use your locations, your vendors and your menu — not a canned demo dataset.
Tailored to your group's structure
Configured with you, not handed over
SmartOPS Margin is part of the SmartOPS OS suite.