Full-service restaurant / Inventory and food cost
Inventory and food cost for a dining room kitchen
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
Restaurant365 goes deepest on recipe-level costing and supplier invoices, but it is priced and implemented for someone running several sites, not one dining room. Lightspeed's Essential tier at $189/month is the realistic middle ground for a single serious kitchen that wants more than a stock count.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 11 August 2026
Step 3
What matters most to you?
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner overall
Toast
The one built for restaurants only, with the lock-in that implies.
The trade-off
You are locked to Toast payment processing. There is no bringing your own processor.
Why it won
- price
- ease of setup
- support
- volume
- integrations
Our scores, 1 to 5, defined on the methodology page.
Everything else, ranked the same way
| # | Product | From | Contract | Card rate | Score | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Toast The one built for restaurants only, with the lock-in that implies. | Free, then $69 | multi-year is typical | 2.99% + 15¢ on the free Starter Kit, 2.49% + 15¢ on the $69 plan | 3.6 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 02 | Lightspeed Restaurant Strong reporting and stock control, priced for somewhere above the small independent. | From $69 | month to month available | 2.6% + 10¢ on Starter, negotiable on higher tiers | 3.2 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 03 | Restaurant365 Restaurant-specific back-office software built for people running five or more sites, priced accordingly. | On request | multi-year is typical | not applicable | 3.2 | Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for full-service restaurants
A full-service menu shares ingredients across dishes in a way a counter menu usually does not; the same duck breast might show up in three plates at three different margins, and knowing which one is actually profitable needs recipe-level costing, not just a count of what is left in the walk-in.
Lightspeed Restaurant does this reasonably well once you are on Essential at $189/month rather than the $69 Starter tier, which is where the actual inventory and reporting depth sits. Toast's inventory module covers similar ground for anyone already running the rest of their operation on Toast, priced as one more module in a stack that adds up.
Restaurant365 is the deepest option by a wide margin, real-time food cost tracking, supplier price alerts, waste and transfer tracking, but the vendor does not publish a price; you get a sales call and a custom quote, with third-party estimates putting the entry tier around $499 a site a month plus implementation fees reported at $2,000 to $10,000. That is the wrong number for a single independent kitchen and roughly the right one for someone consolidating food cost across five or more.
Questions people actually ask
- What's the actual difference between counting stock and recipe costing?
- A stock count tells you what is left. Recipe costing tells you what each dish costs to make and whether the menu price still covers it once ingredient prices move, which is the number that actually protects margin.
- Is it worth automating supplier invoices for one site?
- Usually not enough to justify Restaurant365 on its own. That feature earns its keep once you are reconciling invoices across more than one kitchen and the manual version has become a real weekly time cost.