For restaurants that run on invoices
Stop cooking for free.
PlateCost reads every invoice and shows which plates stopped making money, the week it happens.
Found $177,000 a year at The Lakehouse
14-day trial, no card. $149 a month after that, every location included.
Dashboard
2026-08-08 to 2026-09-07
Purchases, last 30 days
$84,120
Approved invoices
218
Waiting for review
4
Food cost
31.4%
Top products by spend
| Product | Vendor | Spend | 30-day change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ribeye, choice, 12 oz | US Foods | $9,412 | +6.2% |
| Butter, unsalted, 36 lb | Sysco | $4,880 | +11.4% |
| Chicken breast, boneless | Ben E. Keith | $4,105 | −2.1% |
| Heavy cream, 12 qt | Sysco | $2,644 | +3.8% |
| Russet potato, 50 lb | US Foods | $1,930 | 0.0% |
Every Monday, your week explained in one email
What you spent, what moved, and the one thing worth doing about it before the week starts. You do not have to open the app to find out.
Chicken breast is up 9% at Sysco
Your week: $8,660 across 12 invoices, food cost 31.4%.
$8,660
Spent this week
12
Invoices processed
4
Awaiting review
31.4%
Food cost vs 30%
Food cost by week
Spend by vendor, this week vs last
Biggest price moves
- Brisket, whole packerSysco$4.19+11.0%
- Chicken breast, bonelessSysco$3.42+9.0%
- Nitrile gloves, LUS Foods$18.40−8.6%
- Cheddar, yellow blockBen E. Keith$3.05+6.4%
What to do about it
Brisket is up 11% at Sysco
$4.19/lb, from $3.77 three weeks ago. Your brisket plate is now 34% food cost.
Reprice the brisket plate →
01 — Why this exists
A restaurant that could not answer its own question
Michael Lucas owns The Lakehouse in Fort Worth. In 2025 the food cost line kept climbing and nobody in the building could say which items were doing it — the invoices were in a drawer, the recipe sheet was two years old, and the spreadsheet that was supposed to reconcile them had been abandoned in March.
The first thing PlateCost did was read eleven months of invoices in an afternoon. Butter was up eleven percent. Ribeye had moved six times, twice inside one week. Four plates on the menu were being sold below the cost of making them.
The reprice that followed was not clever. It was arithmetic that nobody had the data to do. Annualised, it came to a hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars.
- Annualised margin saved in the first menu reprice
- $177KAnnualised margin saved in the first menu reprice
- Food cost on the repriced plates, one quarter later
- 31.4% → 28.0%Food cost on the repriced plates, one quarter later
- Invoices now extracted without anyone typing a line
- 218 / moInvoices now extracted without anyone typing a line
02 — How it works
Invoice to plate cost, in three moves
No integration project, no data migration, no consultant. The work is three steps and you can finish the first one from your phone in the walk-in.
Step 1
Send the invoice
Drop a PDF, photograph the paper copy, or forward the vendor's email. Extraction pulls vendor, product, pack size, quantity and price, and flags anything it is unsure about instead of guessing.
app.platecost.io/documents/new Drop invoices here
PDF, JPEG or HEIC — or forward them to invoices@your-org.platecost.io
sysco-2026-09-02.pdf62 of 62 linesusfoods-2026-09-04.pdfextracting…Step 2
Build a recipe once
Attach items to a plate with the quantities you actually use. From then on every price change from every vendor re-costs that plate the night it lands.
app.platecost.io/recipes/ribeye-plate Ribeye plate
Menu price $42.00
Ribeye, choice, 12 oz 12 oz $9.84 Compound butter 1.5 oz $0.41 Russet potato 8 oz $0.38 Asparagus 5 oz $1.12 Plate cost $11.75 Food cost28.0% — target 30%Step 3
Act on what moved
The item page shows every vendor who quoted that product and what the gap is worth over a month of ordering. Most of the money is in five or six lines.
app.platecost.io/items/butter-unsalted-36lb Butter, unsalted, 36 lb — price per lb
Sysco current supplier $1.06 Ben E. Keith best price $0.94 US Foods order guide, Aug $1.11 At 640 lb a month, switching this one line saves $921 a year.
03 — Extraction
It reads the invoice the way a bookkeeper would
Every line item, including the ones buried under a fuel surcharge and a case-break credit. Documents arrive in a review queue with a confidence flag, so a bad OCR pass is a question, not a silently wrong number in next month's report.
- PDFs, photographs and forwarded email, from any supplier
- Duplicate detection — the same invoice sent twice does not double your spend
- Line items matched to your existing catalog, with the near-misses shown for a one-click confirmation
- Everything reviewable: the original document sits next to the extracted rows
- sysco-2026-09-02.pdf62 linesApproved
- usfoods-2026-09-04.pdf41 linesNeeds review
- benekeith-2026-09-05.pdfextracting…Processing
04 — Costing
Recipes that re-cost themselves
A plate cost is only true on the day you calculated it. PlateCost recalculates on every price change, keeps the history, and shows the food cost percentage against the target you set — per plate, not as one number for the whole menu.
- Sub-recipes: cost a compound butter once and use it in six plates
- Yield and waste factors, so a case price becomes a per-portion cost honestly
- Food cost banding at 28% and 35%, the same thresholds the app uses everywhere
- Sales mix from Toast, when you connect it, to weight the plates that matter
| Plate | Against 30% target | Food cost |
|---|---|---|
| Ribeye plate | 28.0% | |
| Shrimp & grits | 33.6% | |
| Smash burger | 26.4% | |
| Lobster roll | 41.2% | |
| Caesar, half | 19.8% |
05 — Vendors
What the other suppliers charge for the same case
Upload order guides and the comparison is per item and per unit, corrected for pack size — which is where most of the apparent savings in a rep's quote sheet quietly disappear.
- Side-by-side price per unit across every vendor who quoted the item
- Price-increase alerts the week they happen, not at month end
- Annualised value of a switch, using your own order volume
- Order guides and invoices reconciled, so a quoted price and a billed price are comparable
Butter, unsalted — price per lb
+15.2% since April
Six increases, none of which looked wrong on the invoice that carried it.
06 — Agents
Your assistant can read the books
PlateCost speaks MCP. Point Claude, Cursor, or your own agent at the server with a token you mint in Settings, and it can pull invoices, price history, recipe costs and the food cost report the same way the app does — scoped to one organization, with writes gated by the token's permissions.
Every MCP tool is also a plain HTTP endpoint under /api/v1, described by a generated OpenAPI document, so the two doors cannot drift apart.
claude mcp add --transport http platecost https://app.platecost.io/api/mcp \
--header "Authorization: Bearer pc_…"Then, in the chat:
“Which five items moved the most this month, and what does that do to the ribeye plate?”
It answers from your invoices — not from an export you remembered to make.
07 — Two ways in
Which side of the invoice are you on?
The product is the same engine either way. What changes is whose margin it protects.
I run a restaurant
Plate costs, vendor comparison and a food cost report that is current, for one location or fourteen. This is the page with the numbers on it.
For restaurantsI sell to restaurants
Give your accounts the costing tool they will actually open, under your brand, and see share-of-wallet drift before the account is already gone.
For distributors08 — Where the data sits
Your purchase history is the most sensitive thing you own
Which is why the isolation is enforced by the database and checked by the build, rather than promised on a page like this one.
- Row-level security, per organization
- Isolation is a database policy, not a WHERE clause somebody has to remember. The `verify:rls` check fails the build if a table is reachable without one.
- Private storage, signed reads
- Invoice PDFs live in a private S3 bucket. Nothing is public; every read is a short-lived signed URL issued to a member of the owning organization.
- Your data is not the product
- Nothing is sold, pooled into a benchmark, or shown to your vendors. Export everything as CSV whenever you want, including on the way out.
- Built by an operator
- Michael owns The Lakehouse in Fort Worth and runs the restaurant on this software before anyone else sees a release.
09 — Pricing
One plan, every location
Per-site pricing is why multi-unit operators end up back in a spreadsheet. There is one number here and it does not change when you open the second room.
$149/mo per organization
- AI invoice extraction — upload a PDF, get every line item
- Real-time recipe and plate costing
- Multi-vendor price comparison and savings alerts
- Food cost report with COGS trend by location
- Unlimited locations, users and recipes
10 — Questions
Asked on nearly every call
How long does setup take?
About fifteen minutes. Upload one invoice and you have cost data on the same screen. There is no POS integration to schedule, no vendor onboarding, and no implementation call.
Do I have to change my POS?
No. PlateCost reads vendor invoices, not tickets. Sales are optional — connect Toast if you want food cost as a percentage of sales; without it you still get spend, price movement and plate costs.
Which vendors do you handle?
Sysco, US Foods, Gordon, Ben E. Keith and the local suppliers nobody builds integrations for. Extraction works off the PDF or the photo, so an invoice format we have never seen still parses.
What happens when the trial ends?
Nothing is deleted and nothing is charged. The account goes read-only until you subscribe, and any days left in the trial carry into the subscription.
How is this different from MarginEdge?
Price, speed and scope. One flat rate for the whole group rather than a fee per location, fifteen minutes rather than a ninety-day implementation, and an API and MCP server so your own tools can read the data.
Who can see my invoices?
Only your organization. Every table is behind PostgreSQL row-level security keyed to the organization, files sit in a private S3 bucket reached through short-lived signed URLs, and no data is sold, pooled or shown to vendors.
Start with one invoice
Upload a single PDF and you will know within a minute whether the numbers are worth the rest of your afternoon.
14-day free trial · No contracts · Cancel anytime