Set up Rinvy in 30 minutes

Set up Rinvy in five steps: create the kitchen, check its storage areas, add products, finish your suppliers, then take your first inventory count. Owners and managers do the setup, and anyone who counts can help with the count. The first count is the baseline that reports, ordering, low-stock alerts and food cost build on.

The recommended order

1. Create your restaurant with its operating days and business-day cutoff. The kitchen takes the timezone of the device you create it on. If you set up from another timezone, fix it in Kitchen Settings → Kitchen afterwards. Walkthrough.

2. Set up storage areas in the order you walk the kitchen. A new kitchen starts with Freezer, Cooler and Dry Storage. Rename them to match your kitchen and add the rest, such as Walk-in Cooler or Bar. See set up storage areas.

3. Add products. The fast way is to scan a supplier invoice: Rinvy creates the products and the supplier from a photo. No invoice handy? Add every item you plan to count in your first storage area by hand, or import from CSV if you keep a spreadsheet. You can always add more later.

4. Finish your suppliers with delivery days and lead times so the order list can compute order-by dates. The invoice scan creates the supplier, but not its schedule. See set up suppliers.

5. Take your first inventory count to establish the baseline. First-count guide.

How the setup checklist marks steps done

The setup guide on the dashboard tracks four core steps. Each one is done when the kitchen has the data below:

Storage Areas is the one core step that adding data alone does not finish. The three starting storage areas do not count as set up until you change one of them, even if they already match your kitchen. In that case, any edit marks the step done: a new name, description or color, or a new walk order.

Supplier schedules and order-by dates

The order list works out when to order from two supplier fields. The order-by date is the next delivery day minus the Delivery lead time, counted in calendar days, including days you are closed.

For example, US Foods delivers on Tuesday and Friday with a 2-day lead time. The order list asks you to order by Sunday for the Tuesday truck and by Wednesday for the Friday truck. If you also set an Order cutoff time, the order reminder comes about 2 hours before it. Without a cutoff time, the reminder comes at 9 AM on the day the order is due. A supplier with no delivery days gets no order-by date and no reminder.

Start small

Starting small also fits the Free plan. A Free kitchen holds up to 50 products and 3 suppliers, and the invoice scan can build its catalog from up to 3 invoices. Standard raises the product limit to 300, and Pro has no product limit. See plan limits and feature availability.

What works after the first count, and what needs a second?

Stock levels and alerts work after one count. Anything that measures usage needs a second count to compare with:

• Current stock lists every product with how much is on hand. Works after one count.
• Low-stock alerts fire for products below minimum stock. Work after one count.
• Reports: Inventory Value and Spending work from day one.
• Burn rate needs two completed counts. After that, ordering and prep recommendations get better with every count.
• Standard tier reports (Food Cost, Waste, Counting) start producing meaningful numbers after your second count.

Plan the second count before you finish the first, and keep a regular count day after that. A completed count resets each counted product's stock to what was on the shelf. Tax rules ask for the same habit: IRS Publication 538 says a business that keeps inventory must take a physical inventory at reasonable intervals and adjust the book amount to agree with it.

Skip until later

Once all four core steps are done, the setup guide moves out of your way. The checklist shows Core setup complete, and the rest become optional "level up" prompts you can pick up any time:

• Recipes and menu items: needed for food cost analysis and prep lists.
• Team: invite staff so they can count inventory, log deliveries, and track waste. Each person gets one role in the kitchen: Owner, Manager, Staff or Viewer. Rinvy attaches permissions to roles, not to people, the role-based access control model that NIST describes. See roles and permissions.
• Sales data: Standard and Pro. It appears as a level-up step so your kitchen is prompted to connect a feed. Toast connects directly, and any other POS uploads a CSV. Useful once recipes are in place.
• Demand forecasting: Pro. Needs sales history to learn from.
• Invoice forwarding: Standard and Pro. Saves time but isn't required to receive deliveries.

Related

• Product setup overview
• Plan limits and feature availability