Cooking the Books: Simplifying Kitchen Management

Cooking the Books is your ultimate cloud-based solution for inventory management, invoicing, recipe creation, and rostering. It's designed with chefs in mind, offering a suite of tools to streamline kitchen operations and boost efficiency.

What Does it Do?

🌿 Ordering and Receiving Food: Simplify purchasing with digital invoicing and easy payment options. Schedule orders, bulk send with our Whiteboard feature, and save time with Predictive Ordering.

📦 Inventory Management: Keep track of your inventory effortlessly. Know what's in stock, what's ordered, and get accurate valuations – all at your fingertips.

🍽️ Food and Recipe Planning: Plan your menu like a pro. Our builder helps track measurements, costs, and nutritional info for each dish, ensuring consistency and savings.

💼 Restaurant Management: From food trucks to big restaurants, Cooking the Books platform fits all. Manage your operations with ease, anytime, anywhere.

🔥 Smart Decision-making Tools: Make savvy choices with menu engineering, live costed recipes, and real-time reporting.

💰 Money-saving Features: Digital ordering, inventory control, and complete stocktaking – all designed to save you money.

🙌 Comprehensive Recipe Cards: Keep your recipes consistent and accessible. Scale them up or down as needed and share them with your team effortlessly.

⏰ Real-time Data and Reporting: Access your data securely and remotely. Customize user access and process invoices with ease.

🍌 Extras: Enjoy our free Food and Recipe Costing Templates to crunch numbers and optimize your kitchen costs.

How Does it work with Impos

The integration process with Impos begins with the system generating a CSV file from a SQL script. By default, the export covers a 24-hour period, although this timeframe can be adjusted as required. The CSV file is then automatically deposited into a designated local folder on the server, with the folder location configurable to suit operational preferences.

Cooking the Books (CTB) retrieves the CSV file and analyzes key data such as product names and transaction timestamps. This data is used to map sales activity by time period, supporting accurate inventory management within CTB.

Once the initial configuration for transferring the CSV file from Impos to CTB is completed, the integration runs automatically on a daily basis without requiring further manual intervention. CTB also leverages POS location data to support the management of multiple stock locations and venues.

System Requirements

The partner solutions, including Impos, have specific system requirements to ensure smooth operation and optimal performance. Meeting these requirements is important to maintain software compatibility, system stability, and reliable functionality, while also minimizing potential technical or compatibility issues.

Contacts Partner Regarding Impos Integration:

1. Partner sends email with customer details: Customer name, contact name, contact number, and email address.
2. CPM contacts ACM and relevant salesperson to coordinate integration.
3. ACM contacts the customer.
4. ACM arranges upgrade path with customer and tech.
5. Tech performs upgrade.
6. Tech tests upgrade.
7. Customer is contacted by CPM after one month to review system performance.

What happens if the internet drops out during a CSV upload?

If the internet connectivity dropped before the csv file could begin uploading, the web service would continue to keep trying until a connection can be established, once re-established the upload will commence as per normal, and the file moved automatically into the processed folder when done.

 The only potential issue that may arise here would be if the connection dropped during the actual upload, the process is a very quick one so chances of this happening are rare, there are log files that sit within the CTBPOSIntegrator folder that track all activity for each day so this would be our first point of call to investigate. Just to re-iterate the actual upload does occur very quickly when the service is finally ready to suck through the data so chances of a drop during this are unlikely (it’s not something we typically encounter).

Some sales are not appearing in my CSV export: The Cooking the books exporter will only export items that have been paid for, so those that are unpaid will not appear in Cooking the Books.