Built by a cafe owner in Los Angeles
Your POS stops at the sale. ShelfCount works out what every drink and dish actually used, on Square, Toast, or Clover, then turns your count into a purchase order your vendor really receives. $50 a month, flat.
14-day free trial · No charge until it ends
Square and Clover connect today. Toast is built and waiting on partner approval.
ExampleSale from Square · 7:42 AM
What it used
The modifier gap
On its own, your POS records what sold: one large iced latte, oat milk, extra shot. Without an inventory add-on it doesn’t tell you how much oat milk left the fridge.
ShelfCount reads every sale with its modifiers. You match each drink and size to a recipe once, then say what each modifier does. From then on every sale is costed down to the ingredient, and your counts have something to be checked against.
Oat milk replaces whole milk. The oat carton goes down and the whole milk stays where it was.
One more shot of espresso comes out of the beans, on a ticket that still says latte.
A large uses more milk, more espresso and a bigger cup. Each size gets its own recipe.
Square and Clover connect today. Toast is built and waiting on partner approval. Running a cafe? See ShelfCount for coffee shops.
What you get
One plan, every feature. No add-ons, no per-seat pricing.
One flat price. Add your whole team and every shelf, walk-in and back room. Nothing is metered.
Staff count from their own phone, in the order they walk the room, and scan barcodes once they’re learned from approved receipts. If the signal drops, entries wait on the phone until it comes back.
Build recipes and prep recipes once. When an ingredient price changes, every drink and plate that uses it is costed again.
Set par levels by day of the week. Items under par land on a purchase order for each vendor. You check it before it’s emailed, or let it send itself for vendors you’ve switched on.
Photograph an invoice or forward the email. You approve every price change before it touches a recipe, and price alerts are there if you turn them on.
Sales come in from Square or Clover with their modifiers, so you can compare what you should have used with what actually left the shelf. Toast is built and waiting on partner approval.
Three steps
Upload whatever you have: a spreadsheet, a POS export, a photo of your count sheet. You check it before anything saves.
Paste in a Square access token or a Clover API token, then match each drink and dish to a recipe once.
Count on any phone. You check the purchase order it drafts before it’s emailed, or let it send itself for vendors you’ve switched on. When the invoice arrives, scan it and approve the prices.
Roles
Three roles, and you choose who gets which.
Food cost for any week, what your recipes say you used against what your counts say left, price history by supplier, and the menu items that earn the least. You add people, set their roles and handle billing.
Run counts, review scanned invoices, send purchase orders, and keep recipes and par levels current. Managers see costs and reports, because they are the ones fixing them.
Open a count on their own phone, snap a receipt at the back door, log waste, and look up how a drink is made. Recipes show staff the ingredients and amounts with no cost figures. Reports, margins, vendors and purchase orders stay hidden from them.
Why ShelfCount exists
I run a coffee shop in Los Angeles. For years we paid MarketMan to manage our inventory, and we used maybe a third of it. Counts, recipes, purchase orders, food cost. That’s the whole job.
The price went up at every renewal, and nobody could tell me what the extra money bought. Counting milk shouldn’t cost three grand a year. So I built the tool I wanted to buy.
ShelfCount runs my shop today. Baristas count on their phones. Invoices get scanned at the register. Square sales come in on their own, and I can see my actual food cost without touching a spreadsheet. (We run on Square ourselves, but Clover works too if that’s your system. Toast is built and waiting on partner approval.) If it works for you too, it’s $50 a month, which is about what I think this software should cost.
Do the math
Put in your own numbers. We don’t store what you type. There are more calculators in the free tools.
Before tax and tips
Our guess. Change it to yours
One point of food cost is worth
$346 a month
Your counting and ordering time costs
$346 a month
Invoices to check for price changes
17 a month
One delivery per supplier a week
ShelfCount pays for itself if your food cost moves by 0.14 points, or if it saves you 2.5 hours a month.
An estimate, not a promise.
What you use now
| What you need | A Google Sheet | Your POS’s own inventory | Gut feel | ShelfCount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Counts from any phone | If everyone edits one shared sheet | Varies by POS and plan | No count to take | Yes, in the order you walk the room |
| Knows an oat swap used oat milk | Only with formulas you build and keep up | Varies by POS and plan | No | Yes, once each modifier is mapped |
| Tells you what to order | If you keep par levels in it | Varies by POS and plan | From memory | Yes, from par levels you set by day of the week |
| Purchase order emailed to the vendor | No | Varies by POS and plan | No | Yes. You check it before it’s emailed, or let it send itself for vendors you’ve switched on |
| Invoice scanning and price history | Typed in by hand | Varies by POS and plan | No | Yes, and you approve every price change |
| What you should have used against what actually left | Only if you build it | Varies by POS and plan | No | Yes |
| Price per month | $0 | Depends on your POS plan | $0 | $50 flat |
Checked 2026-10-12. What your POS includes depends on your plan and add-ons, so check its own support pages for yours. The ShelfCount column is what the product does today.
ShelfCount vs. other inventory software
We skip the enterprise modules most independents never open. That’s where the price difference comes from.
| What you get | ShelfCount | MarketMan | MarginEdge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inventory counts from any phone | |||
| Recipe & prep-recipe costing | |||
| Par levels & one-click purchase orders | |||
| Invoice & receipt scanning | |||
| POS sales sync & theoretical vs. actual COGS | Square & Clover now, Toast built, waiting on partner approval | ||
| Unlimited team members included | Plan-dependent | Plan-dependent | |
| Month-to-month, cancel anytime | Contract terms not published | ||
| Multi-unit enterprise reporting | Not yet. Built for independents | ||
| Price per month | $50 flat | from $249 | from $350 |
Against MarketMan, that’s about $2,400 a year back in your pocket.
Already on MarketMan? Export your inventory list and upload it. We read that export directly, so you start with your own items on day one.
Most of this market says “custom quote” and puts you on a sales call before you see a number. Ours is $50, and you just saw it. Our demo is the real product, open to you right now, no email required.
MarketMan and MarginEdge starting prices per location as of mid-2026. Plans change, so check their sites. Feature availability comes from each company’s public pages. We’re biased, but we’ve tried to be fair. All comparisons
Read-only
What it reads
Never writes anything to Square.
Square connects with an access token you create; ShelfCount reads sales, catalog, and locations and never writes to Square. Read-only OAuth is on the roadmap.
You create an API token in your Clover dashboard with read access to Inventory, Merchant and Orders. One-click connect waits on Clover App Market approval.
What it reads
Never writes anything to Clover.
Built, and waiting on Toast’s partner approval. It isn’t live yet.
What it will read
Will never write anything to Toast.
ShelfCount only reads from your POS. It never changes an item, a price or a sale there. A purchase order goes to a vendor only when you send it, or when you have switched on auto-send for that vendor.
Simple pricing
$50/month
Everything on this page, no per-seat pricing. Free for 14 days, and nothing is charged until the trial ends.
Start free trialHave existing data to bring over? Import it yourself for free, or let us do it. Done-for-you migration is $299 one-time.
Start the 14-day trial, or open the live demo first. The demo is the real product with sample data, and it doesn’t ask for an email.