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Open Count. Items are grouped by where they live — walk-in, freezer, dry, bar — in the order you walk them, so you never double back.

Tap OK, Low or Out for each item. That is the whole count. Tapping the same button again clears it if you mis-tapped.

Numbers are optional. If you know you have two cases of romaine, tap the small "Add a number" link and type it — that makes the order more precise. If you do not, Low is enough.

Tap Finish. If you were offline, the count is already saved on the phone and syncs itself when the signal comes back. You do not have to do anything.

A par level is how much of something you want on hand. It is what turns "Low" into a quantity to order.

Set it on the item screen, in whatever unit you think in — 20 lb of butter, 2 gallons of cream. Larder converts and stores it internally.

With a par set, "Out" orders enough to get back to par, and "Low" tops up by about half. Without one, both order a single pack, which is usually fine but rarely exactly right.

You do not need pars on everything. Start with the ten items that actually run out.

After a count, open Orders → Build order. Everything low or out is there, grouped by purveyor, with a suggested quantity and the reason for it.

Change any quantity you disagree with. The suggestion is a starting point, not an instruction.

Create the order for a purveyor, then Send. If they have an email on file, they get a PDF. If they do not, download the PDF and read it down the phone.

When the delivery lands, open the order and enter what actually arrived and what the invoice said. This is the single most valuable thing you can do for your food cost numbers.

Food cost % is ingredient cost divided by menu price. A $14 salad that costs $4.20 to make is 30%. Lower is better.

Larder gets the ingredient cost from your last invoice price divided by the pack size, so a 36 lb case of butter at $151.20 becomes $0.00926 per gram.

Recipes can contain other recipes. A salad uses house ranch, which uses herb oil — cost flows all the way up, and changing the price of canola oil moves the salad.

Cocktails are measured against pour cost instead of food cost, because a 30% target would flag every drink on the list.

If an ingredient has no price on file, the recipe is marked incomplete and the cost shown is a floor, not a fact. Larder never treats a missing price as zero.

You pay for the whole case of broccoli. You serve the florets. The stalks and leaves went in the bin, but you still paid for them — so every pound that reaches a plate has to carry the cost of the pound that did not.

That is the difference between AP and EP. AP (As Purchased) is what the invoice charged you for. EP (Edible Portion) is what is left after trimming, and it is what your recipes actually use.

Larder follows the standard US culinary school formula: EP Cost = AP Cost ÷ Yield %. Enter the yield on each recipe ingredient — the percentage that survives prep — and the cost is divided by it.

A $10 case of broccoli at 61% yield is $16.39 per usable pound, not $10. If you cost that dish at $10 you are 39% light on your single biggest ingredient, and the food cost number on your dashboard is fiction.

Leave the yield at 100% for anything you use as it arrives — oil, flour, salt, a bottle of gin. Most of your list is 100%. It is produce, whole fish and untrimmed protein that matter.

Watch the direction: a 61% yield is not a 39% cost increase, it is a 64% one. Dividing and multiplying disagree, and they disagree most on exactly the items that are trimmed hardest.

Two ways to read an open bottle. Tap a tenth — E through F — if you are eyeballing it. Or put it on a scale and enter the grams.

Weighing needs two numbers set up once: the weight of the empty bottle (the tare), and the density of what is in it. Spirits are about 0.94 g per ml, not 1.0 — skipping that makes every reading 6% wrong.

Kegs are entered as a percentage remaining and converted to pints.

Record line cleaning when you do it. Beer lost to a line clean is real, and logging it stops it looking like theft on the variance report.

Staff can count. That is it — they cannot see prices, recipes, costs or orders. This is enforced on the server, so it holds even if someone goes looking.

Managers can do everything except billing.

Owners can do everything, including changing the plan.

Give your line cooks staff accounts. Counting is faster when the person who noticed the shortage is the one who taps the button.

Larder becomes read-only. You can still sign in and see every count, recipe, price and order.

Nothing is deleted, ever. It all comes back the moment you resubscribe.