Square integration

Connect Square and ShelfCount learns what you sell. Map each menu item to a recipe once, and every sale is costed automatically — that’s what powers your theoretical food cost.

Connecting

ShelfCount connects to your Square account with a Square access token, which you generate from your Square account. If you’re not sure where to find it, email hello@insidermanagement.net and we’ll walk you through it. If you run multiple Square locations, you choose which ones ShelfCount should watch on the Square page.

What syncs

• Your catalog — menu items, their variations (sizes like 12 oz / 16 oz), and modifiers (oat milk, extra shot) are pulled from Square so you can map them.
• Your sales — orders sync automatically throughout the day (roughly every 15 minutes), so reports stay close to live.

Syncing is one-way: ShelfCount reads from Square. It never changes your Square catalog, menu, or prices. The Square page shows when the last sync ran, and a Sync now button pulls fresh data on demand.

Mapping menu items to recipes

For a sale to be costed, the Square variation that was sold needs to point at a recipe (or directly at an item, for simple retail products like a bottled drink). The Square page keeps a running to-do of unmapped variations, and the mapping screen lets you work through them. Sales of unmapped variations still sync — they just can’t be costed until you map them, so the to-do count is worth keeping near zero.

When something changes in Square — a renamed drink, a new size — the affected mappings are flagged for review rather than silently guessed.

Modifiers

Coffee-shop reality: the modifier is half the drink. Modifiers can be given real ingredient effects — “oat milk” can swap out whole milk and add oat milk, “extra shot” adds espresso. Once configured, a latte with oat milk and an extra shot is costed as exactly that, not as a plain latte. Each modifier shows its net cost impact so you can sanity-check your upcharges.

Where it all lands

Every costed sale feeds your food cost reports — most importantly the theoretical usage and cost of everything you sold, which you can hold up against what your counts say you actually used.