Finance & FP&A

How to analyze vendor and category spend as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running food cost off a MarginEdge export, labor off a 7shifts CSV, and vendor invoices off whatever landed in your inbox this week. By the time you add it all up in a spreadsheet, you're looking at numbers from three weeks ago. You can't tell whether your produce spend spiked because Sysco raised prices or because your prep team is over-portioning. Your bookkeeper closes the month and sends you a QuickBooks P&L you can't act on. You need to know today whether your food-and-bev vendors are eating your margin — not next month.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live vendor spend dashboard that shows every charge from Sysco, US Foods, your linen service, and your POS processor broken out by category — updated daily from your bank feeds via Plaid.

Automatic anomaly alerts when a vendor charge is materially higher than the prior month — so you catch a pricing change or a duplicate invoice before it compounds.

A weekly spend summary delivered to your inbox or Slack that compares food cost, beverage cost, labor, and fixed overhead against your targets — no spreadsheet required.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Transaction Insights Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank account data on a schedule — transactions, balances, and categories refresh daily and live inside Starch. If you also process through Stripe, Starch syncs your Stripe charges on the same schedule so revenue and processor fees sit in the same view. Square and Toast don't have scheduled-sync connections today, but Starch connects to Square from its integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your dashboard runs; Toast can be automated through your browser — no API needed. Your Monday Slack summary uses Starch's scheduled automation with Slack connected directly.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid bank accounts and build me a vendor spend dashboard that groups every transaction by vendor name and category — food and beverage, labor, linen and laundry, equipment, utilities, credit card processing fees — and shows me month-over-month trends for each. Flag any vendor where this month's total is more than 15% above last month's.

Using my Plaid transactions, build me a food cost tracker that isolates charges from Sysco, US Foods, and Restaurant Depot and calculates what percentage of last month's Stripe and Square revenue they represent. Show me the trend for the last six months.

Every Monday at 7am, send me a Slack message with last week's top 10 vendor charges, the category each belongs to, and whether any are new vendors that haven't charged me before in the last 60 days.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your business checking and any credit cards through Plaid — Starch syncs your transactions on a schedule so the data is always current when you open the dashboard.

2 If you run Stripe for online orders or gift cards, connect it the same way — Starch syncs Stripe charges alongside your Plaid feeds so processor fees and revenue live together.

3 Connect Square from Starch's integration catalog if you run a Square POS; the agent queries it live when your spend app runs.

4 Open the Transaction Insights starter app from the Starch App Store — it gives you a ready-made spend-by-category and spend-by-vendor view with anomaly detection out of the box.

5 Fork the app and tell Starch: 'Rename the categories to match how I think about my P&L — Food & Bev, Labor, Occupancy, Linen, Processing Fees, Repairs & Maintenance.' Starch rebuilds the category mapping around your language, not generic accounting buckets.

6 Add a food cost section by typing: 'Isolate transactions from Sysco, US Foods, Restaurant Depot, and my local produce vendor and calculate their combined total as a percentage of total revenue for each of the last six months.' Replace those vendor names with whoever actually charges your account.

7 Set an anomaly rule: 'Alert me any time a vendor's monthly total is more than 15% higher than their average over the prior three months — show me the dollar difference and the percentage change.'

8 Open the Runway Analysis starter app and connect it to the same Plaid and Stripe feeds — this gives you the cash projection view so you can see whether a spike in vendor spend is actually threatening your runway, not just your mood.

9 Build the Monday morning automation: 'Every Monday at 7am, pull last week's top 10 vendor charges from my Plaid transactions, group them by category, flag any vendor I haven't seen before in the last 60 days, and send me the list in Slack.'

10 If your linen service, pest control, or equipment vendor doesn't show up cleanly in Plaid (because they debit under an odd merchant name), tell Starch: 'Any transaction containing the string ACH PEST or LINEN SVC, treat as Linen & Sanitation category' — the agent applies the rule going forward.

11 Share a read-only link to the vendor spend dashboard with your GM or chef so they can see food cost in real time without asking you for a report.

12 At month end, export the vendor category totals and paste them into your conversation with your bookkeeper — you're handing them clean, already-categorized numbers instead of a raw bank statement.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

March 2026 food cost review — 48-seat Italian casual, Chicago

Sample numbers from a real run

Sysco (produce + dry goods)	14,200
US Foods (meat + seafood)	9,800
Local produce co-op	3,100
Beverage distributor (wine + spirits)	6,400
Linen & laundry service	1,900
Stripe processing fees	2,300
Square processing fees	870
Miscellaneous equipment repair	1,450
Total March revenue (Stripe + Square)	118,000

March Plaid sync showed $27,100 in food and non-alcohol beverage vendor charges — Sysco at $14,200, US Foods at $9,800, and the local produce co-op at $3,100. Against $118,000 in revenue, that's a 23% food cost, right at target. But the anomaly alert fired on Sysco: their February charge was $11,400, so March came in $2,800 higher — a 24.6% jump. The dashboard surfaced it Monday morning. You pulled up the Sysco invoices in your email and found that produce pricing had increased across three SKUs in week two of March, and your kitchen had also run a special that wasn't costed properly. You corrected the special's price for April and called your Sysco rep about the produce increase. Without the vendor-level breakdown, that $2,800 would have been buried in a general food cost line and you'd have seen it — maybe — in a QuickBooks report in late April, six weeks after the fact.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Food cost percentage (food + non-alcohol bev vendor spend ÷ food & bev revenue)

Beverage cost percentage (alcohol vendor spend ÷ bar revenue)

Labor as percentage of total revenue (cross-referenced with 7shifts or Homebase exports)

Month-over-month vendor spend change by individual supplier

New vendor appearances in the last 60 days (catches unauthorized charges and one-off emergency purchases)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

MarginEdge

MarginEdge is purpose-built for restaurant food cost and does invoice processing natively, but it's another monthly subscription, it doesn't connect your bank feed to your broader vendor spend, and it won't build you a custom report or automation in plain English.

QuickBooks + bookkeeper

QuickBooks gives you the full picture but you're looking at it three to four weeks late, it requires your bookkeeper to close the period, and you can't interrogate it in plain language without exporting to a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheet (manual bank export)

Free and fully custom, but you're doing the categorization work yourself every week, there are no anomaly alerts, and one bad month of data discipline and the whole thing falls apart.

Toast Analytics or Square Analytics

Good for sales-side reporting within their ecosystem, but they have no visibility into what you're spending with your vendors — they see revenue, not the cost side of your P&L.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, runway analysis all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My vendors debit my account under weird ACH names — will Starch match them to the right category?

Yes. You can tell Starch exactly how to handle them: 'Any transaction where the description contains SYSCO or SYS CO, treat it as Food & Bev — Dry Goods.' The agent applies that rule going forward and retroactively to your synced history. You're teaching it your business, not fitting your business into a preset chart of accounts.

Does Starch connect to Toast?

Toast doesn't have a scheduled-sync connection in Starch today, but Starch can automate your Toast account through your browser — no API needed. For most vendor spend analysis, your Plaid bank feed already captures what Toast deposits and what vendors debit, so you may not need the Toast connection at all for this workflow.

What about MarginEdge — can Starch replace it?

Starch isn't a dedicated invoice-processing tool, so if you rely on MarginEdge specifically for digitizing paper invoices and mapping them to recipes, that's a workflow MarginEdge does better today. What Starch adds is connecting your bank feed, your POS, and your cash position into one place — and letting you describe the report you actually want instead of navigating someone else's dashboard. Some operators run both; others find the bank-feed approach covers 90% of what they needed MarginEdge for.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting my business bank account.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's on the roadmap. Plaid, which handles the bank connection, is SOC 2 certified and is the same provider used by most banking apps you already use. Worth knowing before you connect.

My bookkeeper uses QuickBooks. Does this replace them?

No, and it's not trying to. Starch syncs your Plaid transactions and gives you a live operational view — it's for you to catch things in real time. Your bookkeeper still closes the books, handles tax categorization, and does the period-end work in QuickBooks. The two complement each other: you stop calling your bookkeeper to ask 'what did we spend with Sysco last month?' because you already know.

Can I get a weekly spend report without logging into Starch every morning?

Yes. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday at 7am, send me a Slack message with my top vendor charges from last week, broken out by category, and flag anything that's more than 15% above the prior week.' Starch runs it on schedule. You get the number before your morning prep call without opening another app.