RestaurantMate vs doing it by hand

In a lot of restaurants, comparing vendor prices looks like this. A rep texts a few prices on Monday. The produce vendor emails a price sheet. Someone checks the distributor's website, works out the numbers with a calculator and types them into a vendor price comparison spreadsheet. On Thursday, someone drives to the club store.

That method works, and it costs nothing. This page compares it with RestaurantMate, which checks your website vendors' prices every night on your own accounts and puts every vendor's price on the same unit, such as price per pound.

If you buy from one or two vendors and someone keeps your sheet current every week, keep doing it by hand. If you buy from three or more vendors and the sheet keeps falling behind, RestaurantMate does the lookups and the math every night. You still decide what to buy and from whom.

What doing it by hand gets right

It costs nothing but your time. You can start today with the phone and spreadsheet you already have.

You know your vendors. Your rep tells you when a deal is coming, holds product when the market is short, and fixes a bad delivery with one phone call. A spreadsheet doesn't get in the way of that relationship, and software shouldn't either.

You see every number yourself. When you work out a price per pound, you know exactly where it came from.

The club-store run has a benefit of its own. You can pick up the product, check the quality and buy the exact amount you need, with no order minimum.

These are real strengths. RestaurantMate is built to take over the lookups and the arithmetic. Your reps and your judgment stay with you.

Prices move faster than the sheet

A price sheet is a snapshot of one day. Prices on chicken, produce, dairy and fryer oil can move from one week to the next. Some items are sold at "market price", which means the vendor sets the price on the day you buy.

You can check this with your own paperwork. Pull the last eight invoices from your main vendor and find your five biggest items on each one. If any of those prices changed, a sheet you filled in last month is already wrong for those items. An order built from it can go to the wrong vendor.

RestaurantMate re-checks the price of every item on your lists at each website vendor once a night, and shows the date each price was last updated. Vendors without a website are priced from their latest invoice or emailed price sheet.

Every pack size needs its own math

Vendors sell the same item in different packs. One distributor sells chicken breast in a 40 lb case. A meat supplier sells it as "6 x 5 lb", which means six 5 lb bags in one case, 30 lb in all. The club store sells a 10 lb bag. You can't compare those case prices until you turn each one into a price per pound.

The formula:

Price per lb = case price ÷ (number of packs in the case x pounds in each pack)

Here it is worked for one item. The vendors and prices are made up, so use your own.

The 30 lb case has the lower sticker price, but it costs 22 cents more per pound than the 40 lb case. If your kitchen goes through 60 lb a week, that gap is $13.20 a week, or about $686 a year, on one item.

The next week, Prairie Meats drops its case to $76.20. That works out to $2.54 per pound, and now Prairie Meats is the cheaper vendor.

In a spreadsheet, put the case price in column B, the number of packs in C and the pounds in each pack in D. Type =B2/(C2*D2) in E2 and copy it down. The formula is the easy part. Finding today's case price and pack size for every item, every week, is what takes the time.

Catch-weight items, such as many cases of meat, are billed on the actual weight of each case. Our catch weight guide shows how to check them.

RestaurantMate does this math from the pack size each vendor publishes, such as "6 x 5 lb". If a vendor leaves out what's inside the case, the price reads "Missing unit" until you type the amount once. RestaurantMate never fills in a guess.

Count the minutes before you decide

You can put a number on the time this takes. For each item at each vendor, someone has to find today's price, note the pack size and do the division. The price might be in a text thread, an emailed price sheet, a vendor website or a photo taken at the club store shelf. Say each one takes two minutes.

• 20 items at 3 vendors is 60 prices to look up.
• 60 prices at 2 minutes each is 120 minutes, about two hours.
• Done every week, that comes to about 104 hours a year.

At one minute a price, it's still an hour a week, before the drive to the club store. Time yourself on five items and multiply by four. If the real number is more than you have each week, the sheet falls behind and orders drift back to whichever vendor you used last time.

After the order, someone still checks the invoice

The best price on the order only helps if the invoice matches it. Someone has to sit with the invoice and the order and look for these problems:

• Shorts. Items you ordered that weren't shipped, or came in a smaller amount.
• Substitutions. A different product sent in place of the one you ordered.
• Price changes. A line billed higher than the price you saw when you ordered.
• Damaged or wrong items. Only the person receiving the delivery can see these.

By hand, that's a clipboard check at the back door and a call to the rep for each credit. On a busy day it's easy to skip.

RestaurantMate reads every invoice. Website vendors' invoices are pulled daily. Emailed invoices from senders you have listed as vendor reps go to your RestaurantMate inbox, an address like yourname@mail.rmate.ai. Paper receipts can be uploaded, up to 20 at a time. When the vendor's numbers show fewer shipped than ordered, the line is flagged short. Substituted lines show what was sent instead. You mark damaged or wrong items yourself, item by item, so you can chase the credit. Email alerts can flag price changes and short or substituted deliveries. Our invoice guide covers the hand check.

How RestaurantMate does the same job

Here is what RestaurantMate does in place of the weekly sheet:

1. A small device sits in your restaurant. Overnight, the RestaurantMate device signs in to each vendor's website with your own login and reads your prices. It runs on your restaurant's internet because vendor sites block logins from cloud servers. Your logins are stored privately, used only to sign in to that vendor, and never shown back.
2. It works with the vendors you already use. Vendors with a website connect with your login. Email-only vendors come in through your RestaurantMate inbox. If we haven't connected one of your vendors yet we will connect it for you.
3. Prices land on the same unit. Each item shows each vendor's price per pound or per each, worked out from that vendor's pack size. These are your account's prices, so any contract price your account has shows up too.
4. You build one cart. It's split by vendor, with each vendor's minimum shown (the smallest order that vendor will deliver). When another of your vendors sells a close match for less, a green "Save" chip appears on that line.
5. You send your order to the carts. RestaurantMate fills each vendor's online cart from one place and checks every line. You review each cart and check out.
6. The invoice gets read. After delivery, RestaurantMate reads the invoice and flags lines the vendor shipped short.

What you still do with RestaurantMate

RestaurantMate takes over the lookups and the math. These jobs stay with you or your buyer:

• Approve the cart. Set quantities, take or skip the cheaper options, and check each vendor's minimum.
• Check out. Open each vendor's cart and place the order on that vendor's own site.
• Keep your reps. You decide when a lower price is worth a switch. Quality, delivery days and a rep who looks after you all count.
• Receive the delivery, and mark damaged or wrong items when they come off the truck.
• Fill in a missing pack size the first time a vendor leaves it out.
• Ask reps who text their prices to email a price sheet instead. A price sent by text doesn't reach RestaurantMate. A PDF price sheet sent to your RestaurantMate inbox does.

Where buying groups fit

Buying groups, also called group purchasing organizations or GPOs, pool the purchases of many restaurants to get better terms. Some negotiate a lower contract price with your distributor. Others pay rebates, which is money paid back to you later on eligible items. Dining Alliance, for example, offers free membership, negotiated pricing and manufacturer rebates to operators with 1 to 10 units (per its listing on the Texas Restaurant Association site, as of October 2026).

You can use a buying group and RestaurantMate together. The group lowers your contract price or pays you back later. RestaurantMate shows whether the price on the vendor's site is still the best one on the day you order. If your group's pricing shows in your account price, RestaurantMate sees it as you would. A rebate paid later doesn't show in that day's price, so keep it in mind when two vendors are close. RestaurantMate is not connected to any buying group.

Side by side

Who should pick which

Doing it by hand fits if:

• you buy most of your food from one or two vendors
• your item list is short and doesn't change much
• someone on your team updates the sheet every week and checks every invoice
• most of your vendors quote by phone or text and have no website

RestaurantMate fits if:

• you buy from three or more vendors, and some of them have websites
• the minutes you counted above are more than you can spare each week
• invoices get filed without anyone checking them for shorts
• you run more than one location

What it costs

Doing it by hand costs the hours you counted above. RestaurantMate is free for 60 days, with no card required, then $99 a month per location. The device takes a $300 refundable deposit, and one device covers up to two locations. Setup is free and done with you. Leave whenever you want.

Miguel runs two restaurants in Los Angeles. RestaurantMate has cut his food purchases by about 10%, and by 20 to 30% on some items where he switched vendors, and his manager gets back 4 to 5 hours a week. When we asked him to wait three weeks for a new version before setting up his second location, he wrote: "No, it would be great if you could onboard me today. I cannot imagine running my second location without RestaurantMate anymore."

Start with a better sheet

If you're going to keep doing it by hand, use a sheet that does the per-unit math for you. Our guide How to compare prices across your food vendors walks through the method with more examples, including catch weight, minimums and delivery fees. It comes with a free vendor price comparison template you can copy.

When the sheet starts taking more hours than you have, Get started with RestaurantMate, or Try the live demo first.

Vendor names and prices in the examples are made up. Dining Alliance is named only as an example of a buying group, as of October 2026. Product names are trademarks of their owners. RestaurantMate is not affiliated with Dining Alliance or any buying group, distributor or club store. If something here is out of date, email us and we will fix it.

Sources (as of October 2026): Dining Alliance listing, Texas Restaurant Association: free membership, negotiated pricing and manufacturer rebates for 1 to 10 unit operators.