Follow the steps below to build an inventory tracking integration with the Toast platform, which allows restaurants to stay aware of their ingredient usage and potential cost savings.
To follow these instructions, you must have the following scopes:
-
config:read -
menus:read -
restaurants:read -
orders:read
Review and implement the instructions in How to build a Toast integration.
Inventory tracking depends on usage of menu items. To understand Toast menu concepts before you begin development, review menu hierarchy information.
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.
Use the Toast 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 that you build.
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 the restaurant used in this sale.
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 two patties were lost.
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.
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, menu item selections, and payments, see Orders API overview.
|
Object |
Values |
|---|---|
|
Orders |
Consider displaying the following reporting information for orders:
|
|
Checks |
Consider displaying the following reporting information for checks:
|
|
Menu item selections |
Consider displaying the following reporting information for item selections:
|
|
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:
|
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 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.
Consider including the configuration information shown in the table below in your inventory integration.
After you decide 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 that you receive when you poll the configuration API:
-
Use the
lastModifiedquery parameter so that you only retrieve entities modified after the specified timestamp. -
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.
|
Information type |
Configuration |
Additional information |
|---|---|---|
|
Reporting categories |
Sales categories from the configuration API. |
See Toast Central for more information about sales categories. |
|
Order configuration |
Alternative payment types from the configuration API. More information Discounts from the configuration API. More information Tax rates from the configuration API. More information |
These pieces of configuration are often associated with orders. They describe how the order was placed and how its price was calculated. |
|
Menu information |
Menu information from the menus API. In particular, consider saving the names of menu groups and the names, item tags, and SKUs of menu items. |
The menus API returns menu item names and other menu-related information you may want to display in your inventory platform. |
|
Restaurant information |
Restaurant services from the configuration API. |
This restaurant information allows your integration to report on when orders were placed in your restaurant. For more information, see this Toast Central article about hours and services. |
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 whether an order was voided.
Many restaurant groups use 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 multilocationId value in the menus API
to tie sales together across locations.
For more information, see multiLocationId values.
After you build 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
-
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.
For example, 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.