上次更新时间：2026年9月10日 12:26
Answers to common Toast IQ Inventory questions about setup, stock counts, costs, recipes, integrations, reporting, and access.
| Toast IQ Inventory is currently in limited release with select customers. Check back soon for updates! |
Toast IQ Inventory is available to select customers in a limited release. Please check back for updates.
Missing items are almost always a configuration step rather than a problem with your account. Navigate to the Categories section, then Manage. Select the checkbox for each menu you want to manage in Toast IQ Inventory. Your menu items appear once you do.
If you have checked Categories and items still do not appear, contact Toast Customer Care.
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You do not need to purchase the Toast Retail module to use Toast IQ Inventory.
You enter a stock count from the stock counts area of Toast IQ Inventory in Toast Web. Different from other systems, in Toast IQ Inventory, you define what items or a subset of items you want to count, and the system will create the count sheet(s) for you based on the Item locations created. Don't worry if you haven't mapped items to item locations. As you complete your first stock count, Toast IQ inventory will automatically associate items with the appropriate item location during the count.
Open the count you want to work on and enter a quantity for each item.
A count has to be started before quantities can be entered. Counts in a draft state are still being configured, so counting doesn't happen on them yet. You can count from a desktop or a mobile device; multiple people can count the same sheet at the same time, and each entry records who entered it.
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Completing a stock count needs one of two permissions, depending on the step. Entering counts on an in-progress count sheet needs 5.2 Inventory and Quantity. Creating or editing count sheet templates and approving a completed count needs 4.5 Edit Full Menu
Approving a count is the step that writes stock adjustments, which is why it sits behind the broader permission.
You send feedback through the product feedback form linked from your Test Kitchen materials. This is the best route for feature requests, rough edges, and anything not working the way you would expect.
Toast IQ Inventory is in active development, so feedback given while decisions are still open shapes what gets built.
The navigation is changing. The navigation pane is being reorganized to provide a single, dedicated place to manage your items and inventory, rather than accessing inventory features through the Toast Retail section.
Note: The sandbox account receives interface changes before production accounts, so expect things there to look unfamiliar while work is in progress.
Customers on all current Toast inventory products move to Toast IQ Inventory over time. Toast offers three today — xtraCHEF, International Inventory, and Toast Retail inventory — and each has a different path.
You are not moved off a product you are actively using before Toast IQ Inventory is proven for your operation.
You can import both the items you sell ("menu items") and the items you don't sell ("ingredients", "supplies"). If you have an inventory list from another system, including an xtraCHEF export, you can import it to get your data in and start testing.
Recipe import is not available yet.
Toast IQ Inventory is the new name for the inventory capabilities in Toast Retail today, and you keep access to them. It includes purchasing and receiving, stock counts, a centralized catalog, and reporting that brings sales and inventory data into a single view.
The change reflects the broader scope of the product — Toast now serves restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations, retail, and hybrid operations — rather than a change to the core inventory functionality you rely on.
Whether to upgrade now depends on which capabilities your operation depends on. There are feature gaps to weigh first.
You cannot upgrade yet if you use alternate packages or bundles, which are not supported, or Shopify, because inventory quantity synchronization with Shopify is not fully supported.
If you don't use any of those features, you can upgrade, but you should know that automatic out-of-stock syncing to your online menu is not available in every configuration. If keeping your online menu in sync with inventory levels automatically is critical, consider waiting. In the meantime, you can manually sync inventory and item availability in bulk.
You can create four types of items: Retail, Prepared food and beverage, Ingredient, and Supply. Only prepared food and beverage items get the recipe configuration option.
If you always create the same type, you can set a default so that the selection prompt no longer appears. You can remove that default later from the edit view, and you can still create other item types from the secondary drop-down.
You can manage items in either, because it is all one system. Toast IQ Inventory and Menu Manager read from the same underlying data, so the work you do in one place shows up in the other. There is no mapping step and no duplication.
In practice, you can keep doing menu management and item modifications, and set up the way you do today, and only come into the inventory views when you want the granular pieces, such as recipes and stock tracking.
You do not have to track stock on every item. You choose which items to track and stock, and leave the rest alone, which is useful if you care about margin and food cost without wanting to count everything.
Note: If you enter a count for an item during a stock count, Toast IQ Inventory tracks that item and stores the counted amount.
All ordering channels deplete inventory — Point of Sale, online ordering, kiosk, catering, and events. Depletion is real-time (at the time the order is fired to the kitchen), so a sale through any channel is reflected in stock on hand as the order fires to the kitchen.
You can also see which channel a sale came through in the detailed activity view for an item.
Recipes do not have to exist before sales. You can manually enter a plate cost and have it applied to sales to determine margin, even without a recipe for the item.
Recipes are flexible after the fact as well. You can adjust them over time, and changes are tracked, so historical reporting stays intact — there is no need to create new menu items because a recipe changed.
You can change a recipe at any time. Recipes are versioned by time: Toast IQ Inventory records when the change was made, and the updated recipe applies from that moment forward.
Sales before the change use the previous version, and sales after it use the new version. Historical data is not recalculated, so a recipe changed mid-period produces two calculation periods inside that report. Making changes at a natural break, such as the start of a day or straight after a stock count, makes reporting easier to read.
Batch production is supported in the Test Kitchen, and it is manual. For items prepared in bulk ahead of service, such as sauces, stocks, and doughs, batch prep mode holds stock at the prepared item level rather than tracing each sale back to individual ingredients.
You record production, which consumes the recipe's ingredients and creates a quantity of the finished batch item. Batch-prepped items can be counted during stock counts like any other inventory item.
Tracking inventory by sub-location within a single site — separate bar, kitchen, and retail areas — is not available in the current release.
Inventory cost depends on whether you track the item in stock. Items you stock track are costed on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis, so if you receive tomatoes at one price and later receive more at a higher price, the system consumes the cheaper stock first.
Items you do not stock track are costed based on the item cost specified on the item details page, so every sale returns a cost figure. FIFO costing is fully traceable: you can follow the cost of goods down to each individual sale and see which inventory lot it drew from.
Food cost appears in two places. The cost of a single item you sell is its plate cost, shown on the item's recipe, and it is the sum of every ingredient quantity in the recipe multiplied by that ingredient's current unit cost. Cost across your sales appears in the Sales & COGS report.
Margin is calculated from plate cost against the item's selling price, so an item needs both a price and a costed recipe before a margin figure is meaningful.
COGS is blank or zero when the item has no recorded cost for Toast IQ Inventory to apply. An item that has never been received or purchased through Toast IQ Inventory has neither FIFO stock to draw from nor a last purchase cost.
Check that the item has a recorded cost, and that the sale falls inside the period you are reporting on. If the item has a recipe, check that the recipe is complete rather than in a draft state, because a draft recipe does not drive cost or depletion.
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A recipe cost that does not match your expectation usually comes from one of three things: the ingredient unit costs have changed since you last looked, a prep recipe used inside the recipe is costed at its own batch cost rather than per portion, or a unit conversion on one of the ingredients is not what you intended.
Open the recipe and check each ingredient's quantity, unit, and current unit cost. Because conversions are stored on the ingredient and applied everywhere that ingredient is used, a single incorrect conversion affects every recipe that contains it.
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Unit conversions are stored on the ingredient itself and applied everywhere that ingredient is used, so you can review them in one place rather than hunting through recipes. A spirit bought by the bottle and poured in fluid ounces is held in one unit and consumed in another.
Conversions within the same family, such as volume-to-volume, are handled automatically. A conversion between families, such as weight to volume, asks you to confirm a density conversion the first time, then reuses it.
Note: Unit conversions are the most common source of error in theoretical inventory calculations. A mistyped conversion quietly affects actual-versus-theoretical numbers downstream, which is why they are surfaced for review.
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Location-specific pricing is supported in the calculations. If an item is one price at one location and a different price at another, all margin and reporting calculations use the correct location's price.
What is missing is the ability to edit it in the Toast IQ Inventory interface. This is an interface gap, not a data gap — continue setting location-based pricing where you do today and it is honored.
You do not have to recreate recipes at every location. The recipe lives on the menu item itself, so it inherits whatever target and owner that menu item already has. If a menu item is targeted at 18 locations, the recipe applies at all 18.
You do not copy recipes, re-add buttons per location, or manage parallel copies. If you change the recipe, it changes everywhere the item is served.
You can see who changed what and when. Change tracking is built into the core of the product, so for a given item, you can see who made a change, when they made it, and which surface it came from — for example, a change made from the web item library versus one made on a mobile device.
Waste tracking reduces your inventory. Waste logged against an ingredient or a prep item is deducted from stock and appears in the item's recent activity, labeled by where it was logged, so it sits alongside sales depletion.
Waste reasons have to be configured before waste can be logged. The goal is that damage, expiry, and loss are the main reasons you touch quantities manually, with everything else handled by receiving and sales.
Configurable decimal precision is not available. The current release displays two decimal places for everything.
You can edit items in bulk. The item library supports both inline and bulk editing and covers merchandising and inventory fields, including par minimum and par maximum, so you do not have to open individual item screens for routine updates.
You can select many items at once and set values in bulk. Combined with custom attributes, this lets you slice your catalog and then edit the resulting set.
You can add your own fields to items as custom attributes and use them however you need — for example, recording the most recent lot number for an item.
Custom attributes can be printed on labels and are useful for filtering your catalog to make targeted bulk edits.
Inventory updates from invoices, with some manual work at the start. Invoice ingestion updates inventory with minimal intervention, though mapping purchases to products is still necessary initially.
You can set par levels, and par-based workflows are supported for sellable items. You can set par minimum and par maximum values, both inline and in bulk, from the item library. Support for ingredients and supplies is not available yet.
Automated restock to par is not available. If a repeatable transfer matters to your operation — moving a set quantity to a food truck each morning, or a standard daily production run — let your Toast representative know, because it is actively shaping the design.
This is not yet available, but will be available soon.
Note: If automatic out-of-stock syncing to your online menu is critical to your business, confirm it is available in your configuration before you rely on it.
Scale and draft system integrations are an active area of research rather than an available capability. Barcode scanning is included, as is barcode label generation and printing.
Toast IQ Inventory integrates with QuickBooks Online in the US, where sales, payroll, and accounts payable invoice data all flow through. For other accounting systems, a CSV export is available.
Xero support for international markets and country-specific QuickBooks Online implementations is not available yet.
There are three ways to get invoices in, and you can mix them by supplier.
You can assign a barcode to any item, which is useful if you package something for grab-and-go and want it scannable. Toast IQ Inventory generates the barcode and lets you design and print labels.
Labels are customizable: choose which fields appear, including custom attributes, set the width and height for your label stock, and print individually or in bulk. Most label printers are supported.
Prep labels are not supported yet.
You can tag items with allergens, but the allergen list itself cannot be customized. Allergen labeling is legally regulated, so the list is fixed and maintained by a dedicated Toast team that tracks the regulations.
The list changes by country. If your account is configured for the US, Canada, or the UK, you see the allergens appropriate to that market's requirements. Allergens are saved and surfaced in your online ordering and Point of Sale.
Setting allergens on ingredients so they roll up to every recipe using that ingredient is not available yet. Today, you tag allergens on the finished item.
Toast IQ Inventory includes three core reports, designed to bring sales and inventory data together in one place rather than offering a large catalog of overlapping reports: Sales & COGS, Inventory Snapshot, and Inventory Roll Forward.
You can ask questions about your inventory data in plain language instead of building a report, because Toast IQ Inventory is built directly on top of the Point of Sale and works with Toast IQ. For example, you can ask what your stock levels are across your locations, or which items' margins have dropped over a period.
Variance and the Product Mix report measure different things over different windows, so they are not expected to match. Variance compares what you physically counted against what Toast IQ Inventory expected between two counts, while Product Mix reports what sold.
Receiving recorded after counting began is the most common cause of a gap. It raises the expected quantity of stock that was not on the shelf when it was counted, inflating the apparent variance without anything actually being wrong.
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Toast IQ Inventory is not generally available. It is in a limited release with select customers and is rolling out in phases, with capabilities arriving over time.
Whether the beta is right for you depends on which capabilities your business depends on. Contact your Toast representative to discuss your use case and readiness.
Sandbox access is available. A shared sandbox account is the best place to start, and you request it on the access acknowledgment form by indicating you would like sandbox access.
Even if you plan to test on your own production account, request sandbox access as well. The sandbox receives new features first, because production accounts wait until features clear a higher bar for quality and validation testing. That also means the sandbox is where things occasionally look like a work in progress.
Toast IQ Inventory will be available outside the US. When it rolls out, it rolls out to all countries where Toast is sold.
Toast IQ Inventory is a paid addition to your Toast subscription. Head to Toast Shop for more information and product availability.
Modifier support for recipes is not available yet. Modifiers are configurations set on sellable items at checkout — adding a topping, swapping a size, removing an ingredient — and some have inventory implications where ingredients or packaging are added to or removed from the item's recipe.
When it arrives, it covers Add, Remove, and Size modifiers. Add and Remove modifiers link to an ingredient with a consumption quantity, and each size has its own recipe that builds on the core recipe. Substitute modifiers follow later.
Made-to-order and build-your-own menus are a focus area, and pizza, coffee, and build-your-own are explicit focus cohorts.
The honest trade-off is that the more configurations you offer guests, the more you have to tell Toast IQ Inventory about the impact of those choices on inventory. What the design does is make that less painful to set up and maintain, because the recipe sits on top of the modifiers you have already built — there is no mapping step and no parallel system to keep in sync.
A preorder placed for a future date does not affect inventory today. Inventory is decremented at the moment the order fires to the kitchen, not when the order is placed.
For future orders, the order date must be met, any configured prep time is applied, and the order fires at the end of that. Because several settings control fire timing, including an option to delay firing until payment is received, the exact behavior depends on your account configuration.
The issue of overselling pre-ordered items has not been resolved today. Because inventory decrements at fire time, preordered quantities are not reflected in your on-hand count until the day the order fires, so you do not have a clear picture of what is already promised.
Visibility into committed stock — what is on hand, what is committed to future orders, and what is in transit between locations — is not available yet.
Voids return stock only after an order has fired. An order voided or canceled before it fires to the kitchen has no inventory impact at all. An order voided after it has fired returns the stock, and the entry appears in your inventory log as a restock caused by a sales void, so the reason is traceable.
To refund a guest without returning the stock — for example, when food was prepared and then discarded — refund the payment method rather than voiding the order. Voiding is the action that restocks.
There is no default size multiplier, and that is deliberate. Two capabilities replace it: size modifiers, which give each size its own recipe with independently adjustable quantities, and shared inventory, which links items that draw from a common stock using a ratio. Neither is available yet.
Bundles are not available yet, nor is mix-and-match. Bundles are short-lived SKUs, such as holiday bundles or gift sets, where you package several items together at a different price. Functionally, it is similar to a recipe, aimed at retail rather than restaurant businesses.
The mix-and-match capability itself, where a guest picks one entree, one side, and one drink at a set price, is built by a separate Toast team on its own timeline.
Catering-specific inventory handling is not yet built out. If a significant portion of your orders is catering-based, contact your Toast representative — catering operations are an area where customer input is shaping the design.