Solutions
More than food cost
The data that prices your plates also feeds tip-outs, labor dashboards, menu prices and QuickBooks.
Five ways PlateCost works for a restaurant
01 — Tip Calculator
Tip-outs your staff can check
At close, each server scans a QR code and sees what to take from the safe, who to tip out and what they take home. We set it up for your rules.
- Direct tip-outs, tip pools, or both
- Everyone sees the same math for the night
- Your POS and scheduling, such as 7shifts, connected for you
Friday close
Your night, Alex
Get from the safe
$455.10
Card tips $342.80 + party gratuity $112.30
Hand out
Maya R. Host
2% of food · 3h 10m together
$9.40
Jordan T. Runner
2% of food · 4h 25m together
$12.86
Sam K. Runner
2% of food · 2h 05m together
$6.10
AM bar Bar
4% of alcohol · 2h 40m together
$8.30
Chris B. Bar
4% of alcohol · 4h 50m together
$20.50
Take home
$397.94
02 — Sales and labor
Sales, labor and what to do next
Dashboards built from Toast and your schedule: sales by day, labor as a share of sales, and alerts when a number moves.
- Sales from Toast
- Labor from Toast, or from 7shifts in beta
- Alerts when a number moves
Harbor Street
Sales and labor
Net sales today
$8,420
+6% vs last Tue
Labor % of sales
24.6%
-1.2 pts vs last Tue
FOH labor %
11.8%
-0.8 pts vs last Tue
BOH labor %
12.8%
+0.2 pts vs last Tue
Sales, last 7 days, with labor %
Wed
26%
Thu
24%
Fri
21%
Sat
22%
Sun
25%
Mon
31%
Tue
25%
Alerts
- Labor 31% at 3pm: send one server home
- Tuesday sales down 12% vs 4-week average
- 2 auto clock-outs yesterday to fix before payroll
04 — Accounting automation
Invoices into QuickBooks, without retyping
When you approve an invoice, PlateCost sends it to QuickBooks Online as a bill, coded to the accounts you mapped. QuickBooks Online is in beta.
- Approved invoices become QuickBooks bills
- A test mode builds each bill and posts nothing
- Daily sales journal entries are coming
- sysco-2026-09-02.pdf62 linesApproved
- usfoods-2026-09-04.pdf41 linesNeeds review
- benekeith-2026-09-05.pdfextracting…Processing
05 — AI agents and API
Ask your numbers a question
Miles, the assistant inside PlateCost, answers questions about your costs, sales and invoices. The same data is open to your own tools over MCP and a REST API.
- Miles inside the app
- An MCP server for Claude and other agents
- A REST API with tokens you control
// tools/call
{ "name": "get_food_cost_report", "arguments": { "includeUnpriced": true } }
// result: one row per menu item, with its cost and food cost
See it on your own numbers
We connect your POS and set up the parts you want. Book a demo and we will walk through it.