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Welcome to ShiftPlate

ShiftPlate brings the moving parts of running a restaurant into one place: your sales, your team, your costs, and the paperwork in between. This guide walks you through setting it up for the first time. It takes about twenty minutes, and you can stop and pick it back up whenever suits you.

What ShiftPlate does

Everything starts with your point of sale. Once your POS is connected, ShiftPlate reads your sales automatically and turns them into the numbers you actually care about — revenue, busy periods, best-selling dishes — without you typing anything in.

From there, five areas build on that foundation:

You don't have to use every part on day one. Connect your POS, invite your team, and add the rest as you go — nothing here has to be done in one sitting.

  • Dashboard & Reports — revenue, trends, day-parts and staff leaderboards, plus AI-written business reports you can compare week to week.
  • Rota & HR — build the weekly rota, track clock-ins, manage holidays and staff records, and run payroll against real labour cost.
  • Costing — recipes broken down to the ingredient, so you always know your food cost and margin on every dish.
  • Invoices — photograph a supplier invoice and ShiftPlate reads it, updates ingredient prices, and flags any dish whose margin just slipped.
  • Reviews — your Google and TripAdvisor ratings, tracked over time in one place.

How the pieces connect

The real value is in how these link up. A supplier raises the price of beef → you scan the invoice → ShiftPlate updates the beef cost → your burger's margin drops → the costing alerts flag it → and Pepper, your AI assistant, can tell you about it in the morning brief.

That chain only works once the foundations are in place — which is exactly what the next few steps set up.

Meet Pepper

Pepper is the assistant in the corner of every screen. Ask it a question in plain English — "how were sales last Saturday?" or "which dishes are below target margin?" — and it answers from your live data. It also sends a short morning brief so you start each day knowing what changed overnight.

What's next

Your POS connection is set up by the ShiftPlate team — it's included in every plan. If yours isn't connected yet, write to us at hello@shiftplate.app with the name of your POS and we'll take it from there.

While that happens, three things are worth doing right away:

  1. Add your team — staff records power the rota, clock-ins and payroll.
  2. Build your first recipes — so food cost and margins are ready the moment sales start flowing.
  3. Upload a supplier invoice — ShiftPlate reads it and starts tracking your ingredient prices.

Every area has its own short guide — open Help any time from the ? icon in the top bar.