Restaurants live and die on food cost, and the numbers that feed it start on supplier purchase orders and order guides that arrive as PDFs, emails, and photos. PurchaseOrders reads them with AI and returns the vendor, order date, and every line with its item, pack size, quantity, and unit price. Upload a supplier PO below and get spreadsheet rows in about ten seconds.
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A restaurant orders from several distributors, produce, protein, dry goods, beverage, and each sends its own paperwork. To track food cost, cost recipes, or reconcile what was ordered against what was billed, someone has to get those line items into a spreadsheet or an inventory system. That someone is usually the chef or the manager, after service.
Sysco, US Foods, a regional produce house, and the local beverage rep each lay out their purchase orders and order guides their own way. A template built for one is useless for the next, so the reading stays manual across every vendor.
A line reads a case, but the recipe costs per ounce or per each. Miss the pack size or the unit of measure and the plate cost is wrong, which quietly distorts the food cost percentage the whole operation is managed on.
Produce and protein prices change constantly, so last month numbers do not hold. Keeping a current cost per item means capturing fresh line data off every order, not once a quarter, and that volume of typing rarely happens.
A driver leaves a printed order, a manager snaps a photo of an invoice by the walk-in, a PDF lands in email. Much of it is an image with no text to copy, so it gets keyed by hand or, more often, not captured at all.
PurchaseOrders reads each supplier document by meaning, so a new distributor layout works on the first upload. It captures the header and, more importantly, the full line table with the pack size and unit price that recipe and food cost math depend on.
Case, each, pound, gallon, the unit that makes a plate cost correct is pulled with the quantity and price for every line, so the numbers feeding your costing are the right ones.
Broadline, produce, protein, beverage, each vendor layout is read the same way with no template to build, so adding a supplier costs nothing to onboard.
OCR plus AI reads a photographed order left by the walk-in or a scanned invoice, so kitchen paperwork that would otherwise never be captured becomes structured rows.
Excel, CSV, JSON, or the API, so the data feeds a food cost sheet, an inventory app, or your accounting system without retyping.
Multi-unit groups clearing a week of orders across locations use bulk purchase order upload, and accuracy on the item table comes from purchase order line item extraction. Getting the numbers into a sheet is covered by the purchase order to Google Sheets and PDF to Excel routes, and into the books by purchase order to QuickBooks. Comparing what an order guide charged against the supplier invoice is the three-way match, and other operations sit in retail and healthcare extraction.
What each way of getting order data into a food cost sheet actually does.
| PurchaseOrders (capture layer) | Manual entry after service | Inventory suite with catalog feeds | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads any distributor PO or order guide | Yes, AI reads any layout | A person reads it | Only vendors it has feeds for |
| Captures pack size and unit price | Yes, per line | If there is time and focus | Yes, for connected vendors |
| Works on a photo from the kitchen | Yes, OCR plus AI | Retyped by hand | Usually no |
| Costs recipes and tracks food cost | No, your costing tool does | The manager does, manually | Yes, that is its job |
| New or local supplier | Works on first upload | Keyed by hand | Often not supported |
| Setup to start | Minutes, self-serve | None, already manual | Implementation and vendor onboarding |
| Pricing | Free to try, then per document | Staff hours that scale | Monthly platform subscription |
PurchaseOrders is a document extraction tool, not a restaurant inventory or food-costing platform. It does not cost recipes, track par levels, or manage inventory. Tools such as MarginEdge, Restaurant365, or xtraCHEF do that. This tool feeds them, or your spreadsheet, clean line-item data from supplier orders so the costing runs on real numbers.
Take one distributor order and get its lines into a sheet.
Drag in the PDF, the emailed order guide, or a photo of the printed sheet left by the driver. Batch a week of orders if you reconcile weekly.
Tip: Try a produce order, where pack sizes and prices move the most.
Vendor, order date, and each item with pack size, unit of measure, quantity, unit price, and line total come back as rows you check on screen.
Export to Excel or CSV for a food cost sheet, sync to Google Sheets, or send the data to your accounting system. Your costing tool does the recipe math on real numbers.
They upload the supplier PO or order guide to an AI extraction tool that reads the vendor, date, and every line with its pack size, quantity, and unit price, then exports the data to a spreadsheet or food-costing app. This replaces typing each distributor order in by hand after service, which is where most missed or wrong food cost numbers come from.
Because recipes cost per ounce or per each, but purchase orders price per case or per pack. If the pack size or unit of measure is captured wrong, the plate cost is wrong, and the food cost percentage the restaurant is managed on drifts without anyone noticing. Line-level extraction pulls pack size with the price so the costing math holds.
Yes. A photographed or scanned order is an image with no text to copy. The tool runs OCR plus AI to read the picture, rebuild the line-item table, and return structured rows. Accuracy depends on how legible the photo is, and you review the fields before using them, so a blurry corner is caught rather than costed.
No. It extracts data from supplier documents; it does not cost recipes, track par levels, or manage inventory. Those belong in a restaurant platform like MarginEdge, Restaurant365, or xtraCHEF. PurchaseOrders feeds those tools, or your own spreadsheet, clean line-item data so the costing and inventory run on accurate order numbers.
Yes. Because the AI reads each document by meaning rather than by a fixed template, it handles broadline distributors like Sysco and US Foods along with regional produce, protein, and beverage suppliers. A new vendor layout works on the first upload with nothing to configure, which is what makes it practical across a mixed supplier list.
Groups collect supplier orders from every location and run them through bulk upload, up to 100 at a time, to get one consistent set of line-item data across units. That feeds a central food cost sheet or accounting system, so a director can compare item pricing and order patterns across locations instead of chasing paper per site.
Capture every item, pack size, and price.
Process a week of orders at once.
Get order lines into a sheet.
Capture supplier POs for retail.
Convert supplier PDFs to Excel.
