Upload the invoices from your broadliner, produce house and cash and carry runs, and every line comes back as a spreadsheet row with pack, quantity, weight and unit price. Pull those rows into your event sheet and cost a 120 guest dinner from what you paid last week, not from a price list you typed in March.
Reads distributor PDFs, emailed invoices, receipts and phone photos with no templates and no per-event fee.
Compare the extracted fields and line items against your own document.
Upload your invoices
Drop files here or click to upload
3 demo documents, no account needed
Uploading...
The short answer
Catering food cost software built on invoice data starts with the numbers on your supplier invoices. InvoiceExtraction reads each invoice, splits every product line into pack, quantity, weight and unit price, and exports Excel, CSV or QuickBooks bills. You cost an event by multiplying the quantity used by the latest unit price. Plans start at $49 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly, for all suppliers combined.
Item, pack, quantity, weight, unit price and extension land in their own columns, ready for a lookup from your event sheet.
Case price, pack size and billed weight sit apart, so protein and produce cost per portion uses the real unit price.
Sort by item and date and the newest unit price is the one your next quote uses, so a price jump shows up before you sign the contract.
Broadliner, produce, bakery, rentals and the Saturday run to a warehouse club are read without a layout built for each one.
Fuel surcharges, deposits and credit memos come out as their own rows, so they do not inflate cost per guest.
One file for the week or bills in QuickBooks on the Plus plan, with vendor, dates and line amounts filled in.
Save the PDFs from supplier portals and email, and photograph the invoices that arrive on the truck.
All suppliers can go in together. Each document is read on its own, with no templates to set up.
Lines are summed against the invoice total. Anything that does not tie, such as a crumpled receipt, is highlighted.
Download XLSX or CSV, then point your event costing sheet at the unit price column.
Caterers quote weeks ahead and buy days before. In between, the chicken, the cream and the asparagus change price, and the quote does not. If unit prices live on paper invoices in a folder, nobody looks.
Converting each invoice when it arrives keeps a running record of what every item cost, so a quote starts from last week's price and the margin on a repeat client is a number rather than a feeling.
Convert a supplier invoiceTake the unit price from the most recent invoice for each ingredient, multiply by the quantity the menu uses, then add the lines up and divide by guests. The invoice already holds the case price and the pack size, so cost per pound or per each is one division. The only manual part is getting those numbers out of a PDF, which is what the converter does.
Keep a separate row for anything bought for one event, such as a specialty cut ordered once. Those rows keep your standing price list clean.
Four lines from one week of invoices, costed for a 120 guest plated dinner. The unit cost comes straight from the export. Quantity used comes from the menu. The extension is quantity times unit cost.
| Invoice line | Case price | Pack | Unit cost | Used for event | Event cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken breast, boneless, 6 oz | $112.00 | 40 lb | $2.80 per lb | 45 lb | $126.00 |
| Potatoes, Yukon gold | $34.00 | 50 lb | $0.68 per lb | 30 lb | $20.40 |
| Heavy cream | $41.40 | 12 qt | $3.45 per qt | 6 qt | $20.70 |
| Asparagus, standard | $46.20 | 11 lb | $4.20 per lb | 18 lb | $75.60 |
| Total of these four lines | $242.70 |
The four lines cost $242.70, or about $2.02 per guest. Asparagus is the smallest quantity of the four but nearly a third of the cost. If its case price jumps by $8 between invoices, this one dinner costs about $13 more, and a quote built on the old price loses money on exactly that line.
This is the point of keeping invoice lines as rows. When an item moves, you see it in the sorted column on the day the invoice is converted, and you reprice the next proposal instead of finding out at the end of the month.
Event management platforms handle proposals, staffing and client payments, and some include recipe costing. They still need correct ingredient prices, and typing those in from invoices is where costing falls behind. InvoiceExtraction covers the price source only. It feeds a spreadsheet you already use, or the bills you post in QuickBooks AP automation, and does not ask you to move your event workflow.
If you run a restaurant next to the catering arm, the restaurant invoice scanner page covers the same extraction for daily kitchen purchasing, and the warehouse club receipt converter handles the Saturday cash and carry runs.
Owner operators of catering companies, off premise caterers attached to a restaurant, and the bookkeepers who post their bills. The common problem is that purchasing is spread across several suppliers and runs, and no one has the prices in one place.
Yes. Export a CSV in the shape QuickBooks expects, or use the QuickBooks export on the Plus plan, which creates bills with vendor, invoice number, invoice date, due date and line amounts and attaches the invoice image. Many caterers post food purchases split between event cost of goods and general kitchen supplies, and the category column makes that split a filter instead of a retype.
You pay for pages processed, not per event, supplier or kitchen. Starter is $49 a month ($24 a month billed yearly) for up to 500 pages on the most accurate model or 2,500 on the faster one. Plus is $149 a month ($74 billed yearly) and adds bulk upload of 50 files at a time, custom extraction templates, category normalization, QuickBooks export and three seats. Full details are on the pricing page.
Record the unit price from every supplier invoice, multiply by the quantity each menu uses and divide by guests. Converting invoices into rows keeps those unit prices current, so each proposal is costed from the latest price paid.
No. It supplies the ingredient prices. You keep your proposals, staffing and payments where they are and point your costing sheet at the exported unit price column.
Yes. Phone photos, scans, emailed PDFs and portal downloads are all read, and lines are checked against the receipt total before export.
Yes. Credit memos and short shipment adjustments are extracted as separate negative rows, so they never inflate your cost per guest.
Plans start at $49 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly, for up to 500 pages on the most accurate model. Pricing is by pages processed across all suppliers, with no per-event or per-location fee.
No. Your invoices are processed only to create your export and are never shared with other customers or with the suppliers whose documents you upload.
Restaurant invoice scanner that turns Sysco, US Foods and every supplier invoice into Excel, CSV or QuickBooks lines with item, pack, weight and price.
Convert Costco Business Center receipts and Business Delivery invoices to Excel or CSV. Item number, description, price, tax and savings on separate rows.
Convert WebstaurantStore invoices and sales invoices to Excel, CSV or QuickBooks. Item number, quantity, price, shipping and tax on separate rows per order.
Convert Sysco invoices to Excel line by line: item code, pack size, quantity, unit price and extended price from Sysco, US Foods and GFS PDFs, ready for food cost.
Invoice to Excel converter for PDF invoices, scans and photos. Every line item in its own row, invoice numbers intact, batch upload, CSV and QuickBooks export.
How AP automation works with QuickBooks Online and Desktop: how bills enter the file, how vendors are matched, how expense coding and class tracking are applied, and where QuickBooks stops being enough.
Bulk invoice processing for high volumes: uploading hundreds of documents at once, queue behavior, parallelism, partial failure handling, splitting multi-invoice PDFs and surviving month-end spikes.
Upload a few of your least tidy supplier invoices and compare the extracted fields against the documents. That tells you more than any feature list.
