Quick service / counter / Inventory and food cost
Inventory and food cost for counter service
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
Counter menus usually run on a short list of high-volume ingredients rather than deep à la carte recipes, so the value is in tracking portion and waste on those few items precisely, not in building an elaborate recipe book. Toast's module is the simplest route if you are already on Toast; Lightspeed's Essential tier is the better standalone choice for real reporting depth.
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 quick service / counters
A burger counter with twelve core ingredients has a completely different inventory problem to a dining room running forty dishes: the question is not whether the recipe costing is deep enough, it is whether portion control on the handful of high-volume items is tight, because a few grams of drift on a bun or a patty multiplied across five hundred orders a week is where the margin actually leaks.
Lightspeed Restaurant handles this well once you are on the $189/month Essential plan rather than the $69 Starter tier, and Toast's inventory module does similar work for anyone already running the rest of their stack there, priced as one more module.
Restaurant365 is worth a mention specifically for multi-unit quick-service and franchise operators, where standardised food cost tracking across sites is the actual point; it is not built or priced for a single counter, and the vendor's own pricing page has no published number at all.
Questions people actually ask
- Is recipe-level costing worth it for a short menu?
- Less than for a full-service kitchen, since fewer shared ingredients mean less complexity to untangle. Portion tracking on your top few volume items usually matters more than deep costing software here.
- When does Restaurant365 make sense for a quick-service operator?
- Once you are running enough units, or franchising, that standardising food cost reporting across sites is worth the price and the sales call it takes to get a number from them.