ShelfCount help
Short guides for owners, managers, and staff. Search for anything below, or read straight through. New here? Start with Getting started: your first week and take it in order. The reports make more sense once you have a few counts behind you.
Getting started
Getting started: your first week
Set up locations, add your items, invite your team, connect your POS, turn your menu into recipes, and run your first inventory count.
Importing your data
Upload items, vendors, or recipes from any CSV or Excel file, or photograph a paper list. Review before anything is saved.
Done-for-you migration
Send us your export from MarketMan, MarginEdge, or a spreadsheet and we set up your items, vendors, and recipes for you.
Trying the interactive demo
Take a fully stocked sample café for a spin before you put in your own data. What the demo includes and what happens to it afterward.
Your catalog
Counting
Buying & receipts
Vendors and purchase orders
Par levels (including day-of-week pars), suggested orders, order minimums, shopping-route line order, and sending POs.
Receipts and invoice scanning
Scan invoices with your phone, email them in, or upload a file. Review every line before anything changes, and let the app learn barcodes as you go.
Recipes & menu
Recipes and costing
Prep recipes vs. menu recipes, nesting, yields, scaling a batch up or down, and how costs update automatically when prices change.
Building recipes that cost right
Weight vs. volume, oz vs. fl oz, trim and yield, prep batches and portions, and menu recipes, with worked examples and answers to common questions.
Training videos
Add a short "How it's done" video to a recipe so new hires can watch how it's made: which links work, sharing settings, what staff see, and troubleshooting.
Mapping your menu to recipes
Point each POS menu item at a recipe so sales get costed, work through the unmapped list, and give modifiers real ingredient effects.
POS & sales
Square integration
What syncs from Square, how to connect your account, map menu items to recipes, and how modifiers affect cost, plus where it all lands.
Toast integration
What the Toast integration will do once approved, its current approval status, how connecting will work, and how menu items map to recipes.
Clover integration
Connecting with a dashboard API token today, finding your merchant ID, and mapping menu items to recipes.
Food cost reports
Inventory value, below-par, theoretical vs. actual food cost, menu profitability, and purchase history.
Usage variance report
Per item, what your sales say you should have used versus what actually left the shelf, and why some items are excluded.
Price history and charts
Track what you pay over time, spot the biggest movers and outliers, and read a per-item price chart.
Account
Your team and roles
What staff, managers, and admins can each see and do, including why staff never see costs, plus how to add or remove a team member.
Your organization settings
Your business name, address, and logo — where they live and where they show up, like the top of a purchase order.
Kitchen checks and the kitchen screen
Set up timed temperature and food-safety checks in the free scheduling app, put the kitchen screen on a spare tablet, and see what was done, late, or missed.
Referring another restaurant
Share your referral link, what the restaurant you refer gets, what you get in return, and how to track your referrals over time.
Billing and your plan
How the 14-day trial works, subscribing, what happens when the trial ends, what happens if a payment fails, and how to cancel your plan.
Still stuck? Email us at hello@getshelfcount.com and a real person will get back to you.