Create your account and set up your restaurant

To set up your restaurant, sign in, tap Set up my kitchen, and fill in four fields: Kitchen name, Operating days, Business-day cutoff and an optional Location. Rinvy then creates the kitchen on the Free plan with three storage areas and asks how you want to add products. Each field feeds counts, ordering and reports later.

Create your account

Sign in with Continue with Google, Continue with Apple, or an email address and a password of at least 6 characters. The Apple button does not show in the Android app. Rinvy creates your account the first time you sign in.

If a teammate invited you, do not create a kitchen. Sign in with the email address the invite went to. Rinvy matches that address to the invite and takes you to the kitchen with the role you were given. If you signed in with another address, tap Login with a different email on the setup screen. See invite users and assign roles.

Try the demo, or set up your own kitchen

The first screen gives you two choices:

• Try the Demo opens Bob's Burgers, a sample burger restaurant on the Pro plan with counts, recipes and reports already filled in. Use it to look around before you enter your own data.
• Set up my kitchen opens the setup form described below.

You can do both. While you look around the demo, a banner on Home links to Create your kitchen. After you create it, the same banner links to Copy this catalog into your kitchen, which opens copying between kitchens with the demo picked as the source. Copying out of the demo works on every plan, Free included. The demo stays in your kitchen menu, marked Demo, so you can switch back. Each account has one demo kitchen. If you come back to this screen later, the card reads Open the Demo and opens the demo you already have.

If you start from See a real kitchen first on the Rinvy home page or the sign-in page, you skip this screen. Rinvy opens the demo as soon as you have signed up. If you already have a kitchen, you go to its Home instead.

Kitchen name

The kitchen name is the only required field. Your team sees it in the kitchen menu, and emails use it too: an invite arrives as "You've been invited to your kitchen name on Rinvy", and the count summary email names the kitchen in its subject.

On Standard and Pro, the invoice forwarding address also starts with the name. A kitchen called Ember & Oak gets an address such as ember-oak-1a2b3c4d@rinvy.app. Rinvy builds that address once, the first time someone generates it, and keeps it. See invoice email forwarding.

Operating days

Pick the days your kitchen is open. All seven days start selected, so tap the days you are closed to turn them off.

Rinvy divides usage by open days only. For example, a kitchen closed on Sunday and Monday counts chicken on two Mondays, one week apart, and used 50 lb in between. Only 5 of those days were open, so the burn rate is 10 lb a day, not about 7 lb. The order list and the stockout check also count open days until the next delivery, and demand forecasts skip closed days.

If you turn every day off, Rinvy treats every calendar day as open.

Business-day cutoff

The business-day cutoff is the hour that separates one business day from the next. The default is 4 AM. Sales from your POS that ring before the cutoff count toward the previous day, so a 1:30 AM ticket on Saturday is part of Friday's sales. The order list uses the same hour to decide which business day it is when you open it after midnight.

If you never trade past midnight, set the cutoff to midnight (00:00). Every business day is then a calendar day. On the Free plan, Kitchen settings does not show this field, so choose the hour now.

Which timezone does a new kitchen use?

A new kitchen uses the timezone of the phone or computer that you create it on. Rinvy reads the device's zone name, such as America/Chicago or Europe/London. These names come from the IANA time zone database. If the device does not report a zone, the kitchen starts on America/Chicago.

Reports, lookback windows, expiration alerts and daily charts all use this timezone. Before you create the kitchen, make sure the device shows the right zone. Apple explains how to check the time zone on an iPhone, and Google explains how to set the time zone on Android.

To change the timezone after setup, open Kitchen settings, choose Kitchen, and pick your Timezone.

Location (optional)

Type a city and state, for example Ames, IA. Pro's demand forecast uses it to pull the weather for your area. Nothing else reads it, so on Free and Standard you can leave it blank. Kitchen settings shows the field only on Pro, as City + state under Integrations. If you plan to try Pro, type the city now.

What Rinvy sets up for you

When you tap Create kitchen, Rinvy adds:

• Three storage areas, in this walk order: Freezer, Cooler and Dry Storage. Rename them or add your own on the Storage Areas page.
• You, as the Owner of the kitchen.
• The Free plan, with room for 50 products and 3 suppliers. See plan limits.

If you built a dish in the free Food Cost Calculator in the same browser before you signed up, Rinvy adds that dish to the new kitchen as your first products, recipe and menu item.

Stock your shelves

After you create the kitchen, Rinvy asks one more question before showing you the dashboard: how do you want to add your products?

• Scan a supplier invoice (fastest): photograph one delivery invoice and Rinvy builds your products, supplier, and storage areas. A Free kitchen can build its catalog from up to 3 invoices. See Build your catalog from an invoice.
• Import CSV: bring storage areas, suppliers, and products in from a CSV. See Import products from CSV.
• Enter manually: add products one at a time on the Products page.

Skipping is safe. If you choose Skip for now, the dashboard offers the same invoice-scan option until your first product exists, so you can come back to it later.