Toast vs Square for small restaurants: POS data and prep planning
Choosing a Point of Sale (POS) system is one of the most critical decisions for a small food and beverage business. Toast and Square are the two dominant platforms in the independent restaurant space. While both process payments and send orders to the kitchen, their reporting structures, export capabilities, and how they assist in daily prep planning differ significantly.
Square POS: simplicity and low barrier to entry
Square is famous for its ease of use and zero monthly fee software option. For small bakeries, pop-ups, and coffee shops, it represents a straightforward solution:
- Hardware flexibility: Square runs on iPads, iPhones, and proprietary registers, with affordable plug-in readers.
- Flat-rate pricing: Pay a percentage of card transactions, with no monthly base software fees for the standard tier.
- Simplified reporting: Square provides high-level sales summaries, item sales reports, and basic category breakdowns.
However, Square’s CSV exports are relatively flat. If your menu relies heavily on complex modifier configurations (e.g., customized breakfast sandwiches, espresso drink options), analyzing how modifiers contribute to ingredient usage in Square requires manual work.
Toast POS: built specifically for foodservice
Toast is designed from the ground up for restaurants, cafes, and bakeries. It does not serve retail shops or beauty salons. Key aspects include:
- Advanced table and menu management: Built to handle complex coursing, seat numbers, and kitchen display screens.
- Detailed item and modifier separation: Toast exports distinct files for Item Selection Details and Modifier Selection Details, allowing operators to track exactly which modifiers were sold with which items.
- Granular PMIX (Product Mix) reports: Provides deep insight into sales by hour, day of the week, and kitchen station.
The tradeoff is pricing. Toast typically carries monthly software subscription fees per terminal, plus hardware setup costs, making it a larger financial commitment for an early-stage kitchen.
POS data and daily kitchen prep
Neither Toast nor Square natively generates a dynamic kitchen prep sheet telling your prep cooks exactly how many units of an item or modifier to prepare each morning based on current inventory and waste logs. To do this, owners must export sales CSV files and manually compute the math in a spreadsheet.
If you want to turn your Toast or Square sales export CSV files into a clean daily prep plan and track high-waste inventory items without setting up complex software, FoodSaver offers a lightweight, budget-friendly tool to automate the process.