Building an inventory tracking integration

Follow the steps below to build an inventory tracking integration with the Toast platform.

To follow these instructions, you must have the following scopes:

  • config:read

  • menus:read

  • restaurants:read

  • orders:read

  1. Setup

    Complete initial integration setup 

    Review and implement the instructions on the Getting Started section.

    Review menu hierarchy 

    Inventory tracking depends on usage of menu items. To understand Toast menu concepts before you begin development, review menu hierarchy information.

  2. Ingredient management

    Build purchase tracking functionality 

    Restaurants may want to compare ingredient purchases with ingredient usage to understand how much of each ingredient they discard. Your integration should have a place in which restaurants can enter the date they purchased an ingredient and the volume they purchased. It should also allow restaurants to record when they discarded the remainder of an ingredient.

    Retrieve menu items 

    Use Toast's menus API to retrieve all menu items that the restaurant sells. Your inventory functionality should allow restaurant administrators to map recipes to menu items using the recipe management functionality you build

    Build recipe management functionality 

    Restaurants may want to report on specific ingredient volumes and sales. For example, your integration's functionality should allow restaurant administrators to record that a ham and cheese sandwich requires bread, ham, and cheese. Then when a guest orders a ham and cheese sandwich, your reports can reflect the amount of bread, ham, and cheese that a ham and cheese sandwich the restaurant used in this sale.

    Build close-out inventory entry 

    Restaurants often want to record the total volume of each ingredient that remains at the end of the day. Your integration should have close-out inventory entry functionality that allows restaurants to record this information. This functionality should also evaluate how much of each ingredient was wasted. For example, if a restaurant has 50 burger patties at the beginning of the day, sells 30 hamburgers, and has 18 patties at close-out, your integration should record that there were two patties lost.

  3. Sales reporting

    Determine closeout hour 

    The closeoutHour value in the General object returned by the restaurants API contains the restaurant's closeout hour.

    The default closeout hour is 4:00 a.m. local time unless a Toast employee changes this setting. The businessDate value on API data changes after the closeoutHour.

    Consider Daylight Savings Time when interacting with the closeout hour.

    Plan your display 

    The following table provides suggested information that you can display in different types of inventory reports. For more information about the difference between orders, checks, item selections, and payments, see Orders API overview.

    Object

    Values

    Orders

    Consider displaying the following reporting information for orders:

    • Order source

    • Opened date

    • Paid date

    • Closed date

    • Voided status

    Checks

    Consider displaying the following reporting information for checks:

    • Display number

    • Tab name

    • Total amount

    • Refunded amount

    • Applied discount name(s)

    • Applied discount amount(s)

    Menu item selections

    Consider displaying the following reporting information for item selections:

    • Menu item name (use displayName value on Selection object)

    • Applied modifier names (modifiers may be nested arbitrarily deep on a menu item)

    • Price

    • Applied discount name(s)

    • Applied discount amount(s)

    • Sales category name

    • Menu item tags

    • Menu item SKU

    Payments

    By reporting on payments, you help restaurant administrators understand their profit margins on ingredients and menu items. Consider displaying the following reporting information for payments:

    • Amount

    • Refund information

    • Type

    • Payment status
    Set up a recurring order retrieval 

    Retrieve all orders from the previous day using the /ordersBulk endpoint of the orders API. See Getting detailed information about multiple orders for more information. Use the startDate and endDate query parameters to retrieve orders by their modifiedDate timestamp.

    Consider a one-time historical order backfill per location 

    Consider loading historical order information for each restaurant location one time when that location starts using your integration. Toast support recommends retrieving twelve weeks of historical data.

    Retrieve restaurant configuration information 

    Consider including the configuration information shown in the table below in your inventory integration. After deciding which configuration information you want to display, set up a daily poll to the configuration API and menus API to retrieve it. To reduce the amount of data you receive when polling the configuration API, use the lastModified query parameter so that you only retrieve entities modified after the specified timestamp. In addition, only retrieve a new menu when you determine that your existing menu is outdated. For more information about when to retrieve a new menu, see Determining if a restaurant's menu data has gone stale.

    Add additional business logic 

    Consider suppressing voided orders from your reports by default and allowing users to actively choose to display these transactions. Use the voided value on an Order object to determine if an order was voided.

    Track sales across enterprise groups 

    Many restaurant groups the enterprise module of the Toast platform to share entities across many locations. To track sales of the same item across multiple restaurant locations, use the masterId value in the menus API to tie sales together across locations. For more information, see multiLocationId values.

    Build your inventory report display and summaries 

    After building a basic data warehouse display of transactional data, consider summarizing inventory and sales in any of the following ways:

    • Inventory data:

      • Total sales per ingredient in dollars or currency value

      • Profit margin per ingredient

      • Total volume of each ingredient used

      • Wastage per ingredient

    • Sales data:

      • Overall sales value in dollars or currency value

      • Total number of orders

      • Total sales per sales category

      • Total sales per item tag

  4. Predictive capabilities

    Evaluate future purchase decisions 

    Your integration will be particularly helpful for restaurants if you use the data you mine to produce advice about the inventory purchases they should make in the future. Is the restaurant about to run out of flour? Should they stock up on burgers on Fridays if burgers tend to sell well on Saturdays? Should they remove a certain item from their menu if it has not sold well in months? Are they undercharging for avocados? Consider how you can help restaurants make smart purchase decisions in the future and make optimal use of their current inventory today.

Congratulations on building an inventory tracking integration, allowing restaurants to stay aware of their ingredient usage and potential cost savings.