Square integration

Connect Square and ShelfCount learns what you sell. Map each menu item to a recipe once, and every sale is costed automatically. That’s what powers your theoretical food cost. Run Toast or Clover instead? See Toast integration or Clover integration, coming soon.

Connecting

ShelfCount connects to your Square account with a Square access token, which you generate from your Square account. If you’re not sure where to find it, email hello@insidermanagement.net and we’ll walk you through it. If you run multiple Square locations, you choose which ones ShelfCount should watch on the Square page.

What syncs

Two things. Your catalog: menu items, their variations (sizes like 12 oz / 16 oz), and modifiers (oat milk, extra shot) are pulled from Square so you can map them. And your sales: orders sync automatically throughout the day, roughly every 15 minutes, so reports stay close to live.

Syncing is one-way: ShelfCount reads from Square. It never changes your Square catalog, menu, or prices. The Square page shows when the last sync ran, and a Sync now button pulls fresh data on demand.

Mapping menu items to recipes

For a sale to be costed, the Square variation that was sold needs to point at a recipe (or directly at an item, for simple retail products like a bottled drink). The Square page keeps a running to-do of unmapped variations, and the mapping screen lets you work through them. Sales of unmapped variations still sync. They just can’t be costed until you map them, so the to-do count is worth keeping near zero.

When something changes in Square (a renamed drink, a new size), the affected mappings are flagged for review rather than silently guessed.

Modifiers

Coffee-shop reality: the modifier is half the drink. Modifiers can be given real ingredient effects. "Oat milk" can swap out whole milk and add oat milk; "extra shot" adds espresso. Once configured, a latte with oat milk and an extra shot is costed as exactly that, not as a plain latte. Each modifier shows its net cost impact so you can sanity-check your upcharges.

Where it all lands

Every costed sale feeds your food cost reports. The big one is the theoretical usage and cost of everything you sold, which you can hold up against what your counts say you actually used.