Deploying and Maintaining a Restaurant Inventory System: Why COGS-Well is Designed for Ease

For most restaurant operators, the phrase "inventory software database setup" brings to mind reviewing hundreds of old invoices, months of manual data entry, and thousands of dollars in setup fees from the system provider. For most inventory, recipe, and cost management systems, your initial system setup is measured in months, not days.

At COGS-Well, our founders—with decades of experience in restaurant management technology—set out to break this cycle. We designed our platform around three core strategies that eliminate or minimize the administrative burden of traditional systems.

Automated Inventory Database Setup

A primary reason new inventory system implementation projects fail is the initial database mountain—the weeks spent manually researching and then entering the inventory items. For the initial setup, each inventory item will require a pack size, count unit, and recipe unit configuration. Some systems also require a storage location.  

Most inventory system providers require you to set up your initial inventory item database. It is not uncommon for a full-service restaurant to have over 1,500 different inventory items. On average, it takes 3 minutes to add a new inventory item manually. That adds up to 4,500 minutes (75 hours), provided you never get distracted and that all the information you need is readily available.

COGS-Well is the only inventory system provider that builds and configures your starting inventory database for you, and we do so in just a few days. We do this by utilizing our proprietary, intelligent technology called Standard Packing—our secret sauce.

“COGS-Well was a natural fit for the infrastructure we were building. It integrated with our other systems, was very easy to implement, and facilitated the new behavior of counting inventory for our managers.” – Jennifer Beougher, CFO, Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group

How does Standard Packaging Work?

• Standard Pack Size: COGS-Well has almost 9,000 Standard Pack Size definitions that reside in our Standard Packaging table.  Each definition has a preconfigured pack size description with a measure class (count, volume, or weight), a count unit, and a recipe unit configuration. Count units enable you to count partial Packs, and recipe units are for using the item as an ingredient in a recipe.

• Vendor Packaging Maps: COGS-Well has mapped about 21,000 packaging descriptions used by vendors to their corresponding standard pack size definition in our Standard Packaging table, and this table is continually expanding.

• Automated Configuration: When COGS-Well imports the digitized line items from vendor invoices, the vendor's pack size for the item is recognized, and the inventory item is automatically added to your database, complete with the count unit and recipe units already configured.

• Uniformity: If vendor A has a pack size description of 5 LBS, vendor B uses 5 Pounds, vendor C uses 5#, and vendor D uses 5 Lbs., they are all mapped to one standard pack size in COGS-Well. All items in the database that have come in a 5-pound pack will have the same pack size definition.

• Accuracy: The item count and recipe information will always be accurate because each Standard Pack Size already has a count and recipe unit defined and configured.  In this example, Pound is the count unit with 5 in a Pack, and Weighted Ounce is the recipe unit with 80 in a Pack.

Ongoing Inventory Database Maintenance

What makes inventory databases a challenge to maintain is that item packaging frequently changes, you change vendors, your vendors substitute items, and you buy new items. Each of these events creates a new inventory item in a system. An average full-service COGS-Well customer receives 36 new inventory items per month.

COGS-Well’s Standard Packaging also automates ongoing maintenance by automatically adding and configuring new items to your database. Using the same 3 minutes per new inventory item, and 35 new items per month, this represents a saving of 1.75 hours per month or 21 hours per year.

Managers are often called upon to maintain the inventory database in a system like COGS-Well. But they are managers – not data analysts.  They can easily make mistakes or even neglect to deal with new items on a timely basis. With COGS-Well, managers are freed up to manage.

Receiving Audit Service

Intelligent technology and automation are great tools, but they aren’t perfectly reliable. What happens if an invoice is smudged, the pack size for an item is omitted or difficult to read, or the item code is missing? COGS-Well has a team of human auditors just for these reasons, who provide a Receiving Audit Service.

Our Receiving Audit Service auditors work every day. They are alerted on a special dashboard every time one of our customers receives a new item. Their job is to review every new item to make sure the information is accurate and complete. We call this Validation. In 2025, our auditors validated 267,314 new inventory items for our customers.  

"COGS-Well’s invoice scanning and audit service saves each of our managers 1.5 to 2 hours per week. For 13 locations, it is also saving me 4 hours per week at the home office.” - Billy Williams, IT Manager, Collier Restaurants

Menu Item and Recipe Database Setup

COGS-Well automatically creates your menu items (we call them Sales Items) by importing them directly from your POS system.  The item name, its sales category, and its most current price are automatically configured. All of our sales-related reporting is available to you immediately, without any additional setup.

If you want to add recipes to Sales Items, all you have to do is add the ingredients, portions, and any target cost or profit information you may wish to include.  To make recipe building easier, COGS-Well provides what we refer to as Flexible Recipe Units.

Vendors sell items by weight (ounces, kilograms, etc.), count/each, or by volume (fluid ounces, milliliters, etc.). However, chefs often use cups, liters, tablespoons, or grams. In addition, your recipes that use an ingredient like white wine may call for it by the fluid ounce in one recipe, by the cup in another, and by the liter in another.

COGS-Well’s flexible recipe units allow you to do two important things. The first is a recipe unit library that allows you to select any recipe unit from a measure class. For example, you can use ground beef in a recipe by ounce, pound, gram, or kilogram, and the cost will always be correct. Or wine by the fluid ounce, cup, or liter.

The second example of flexible recipe units is the ability to assign multiple measure classes to an ingredient. For example, onions can have a recipe unit configuration for weight, volume, and each. So, the recipe unit used for onions can be ounces for your scrambled eggs recipe, cups for your beef stock, and each for your chili.

We estimate that COGS-Well saves about 1 to 2 minutes per recipe item setup on average. Our average full-service restaurant customer has 411 recipes (many customers have many more recipes). If we use 1.5 minutes as an average savings, that is a little over 10 hours saved initially, and there will be added savings when you add or modify recipes.

Summary: The COGS-Well Method

Restaurant inventory, recipe, and cost management systems take time to set up and maintain. COG-Well is the only system provider that can provide the tools and services necessary to minimize this effort. Making it easier to get started and then keep going is often the difference between success and failure.

• Getting Started: 2-3 days, not months

• Inventory Database Setup: Save 75 hours

• Inventory Database Maintenance: Save 1-2 hours per week

• Recipe Database Setup: Save 10 hours