Written by: JJ Tan, Founder, Jelly
Key Takeaways for Square, MarketMan, and Jelly
- Square’s basic inventory only tracks finished goods and cannot handle recipe-level costing or live margin visibility without the MarketMan add-on.
- UK restaurants lose 4–10% of inventory value annually to waste and errors, so accurate COGS tracking is essential to protect gross profit.
- Setting up ingredient-level control in Square requires MarketMan, which adds cost, manual invoice entry, and usually 1–2 days of onboarding.
- Common pitfalls include data drift, unit conversion errors, and missing waste logs, and each one distorts margin reporting.
- Jelly integrates directly with Square POS to deliver automated invoice scanning, real-time dish costing, and price alerts at a flat £129 per location, and you can book a demo to see how Jelly helps your kitchen recover margin.
What You Need Before Setup
You need an active Square for Restaurants Plus or Premium subscription to follow this guide. Basic Square does not support ingredient-level tracking. You also need familiarity with the Square Dashboard, your UK supplier names and account numbers, and VAT-registered status if your turnover exceeds the current threshold. Have your opening stock counts ready and prepare a list of your core recipes before starting setup.
Why Ingredient-Level Tracking Protects Your Margin
UK restaurants lose 4–10% of their inventory value to waste, shrinkage, and administrative errors every year, which directly reduces gross profit. Food waste costs the UK hospitality sector an estimated £3.2 billion annually, with around 75% considered avoidable through better tracking at ingredient level. Food and beverage prices have risen year-on-year in recent periods, so every hidden loss now hits a tighter margin.
Accurate COGS uses the formula (Opening Stock + Purchases) – Closing Stock. Inaccurate stock figures skew this calculation entirely, which makes menu profitability figures unreliable for management decisions. Ingredient-level visibility keeps this formula trustworthy and links every sale, purchase, and waste event to a clear cost. The step-by-step process below shows how to configure Square and MarketMan to close this visibility gap.
Book a demo to see how Jelly automates COGS tracking in real time →
Step-by-Step: Configuring Square with MarketMan
- Enable Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan. In your Square Dashboard, go to Apps > App Marketplace and activate the Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan integration. This setup requires a Square Plus or Premium plan. Billing runs month-to-month with no setup fee.
- Separate menu items from ingredients. In the MarketMan portal, distinguish between menu items, which Square sells, and ingredients, which your suppliers deliver. A menu item such as Margherita Pizza links to ingredients such as 00 flour, mozzarella, passata, and olive oil. Each ingredient carries a unit of measure, for example grams, millilitres, or whole units.
- Configure UK-specific unit conversions. UK suppliers usually invoice in kilograms and litres, while recipes often use grams and millilitres. In MarketMan, set the purchase unit, such as a 1 kg bag of 00 flour at £1.80, and the recipe unit, such as 250 g per pizza base. The system then calculates a per-gram cost of £0.0018 and deducts 250 g from stock each time a Margherita is sold. Repeat this mapping for every ingredient across your supplier invoices.
- Build detailed recipe templates. For each menu item, create a recipe in MarketMan that lists every ingredient and its quantity per portion. For the Margherita example, use 250 g flour, 80 g mozzarella, 60 g passata, and 5 ml olive oil. MarketMan tracks complex recipes and modifiers to calculate true plate costs at the ingredient level, and menu changes in Square POS automatically update inventory.
- Log waste in a consistent way. In MarketMan, use the waste-logging module after each service. Record the ingredient, the quantity discarded, and the reason, such as spoilage, over-prep, or breakage. MarketMan enables documentation and analysis of waste patterns to identify cost-saving opportunities. Without this step, you cannot resolve variances between theoretical and actual usage.
- Set reorder alerts and par levels. For each ingredient, define a par level based on your average daily usage and supplier lead time. MarketMan generates purchase orders based on real-time usage and sends low-stock notifications. This process reduces the risk of running out mid-service.
- Run VAT-compliant COGS reports. Export your purchases report from MarketMan and confirm that all figures are net of VAT before calculating COGS. Cross-reference these figures against your Square sales data to produce a gross profit figure. This export then feeds into accounting software such as Xero for your VAT return.
Common Mistakes When Using MarketMan with Square
Data drift. Inventory records in basic POS systems frequently diverge from physical stock counts because manual adjustments accumulate small errors over time. Conduct weekly physical counts and reconcile against MarketMan’s theoretical usage to catch drift early, since this kind of drift contributes to the 4–10% inventory loss mentioned earlier.
Unit conversion errors. Entering a recipe quantity in kilograms when the purchase unit is grams inflates theoretical usage by a factor of 1,000. Audit every ingredient’s unit mapping before going live. Inconsistent portioning by kitchen staff can cause actual food costs to run 6% above theoretical costs on high-value proteins, and unit errors compound this gap further.
Missing waste entries. A bar discovered that unrecorded pour waste was costing over £800 a month in spirits alone. Assign one team member per shift to log waste before close-down. Without consistent entries, your variance reports lose their value.
How to Measure Success After Setup
Track three metrics weekly: admin hours spent on stock management, stock accuracy percentage, and gross profit margin per dish. A well-configured system should cut manual stock admin significantly and surface margin changes within days rather than weeks.
Amber, a Mediterranean restaurant in East London, saves £3,000–£4,000 per month after switching to automated invoice scanning and real-time dish costing with Jelly. Chef-Owner Murat Kilic links this saving to faster reactions to supplier price changes and tighter menu controls, outcomes that depend on live data rather than weekly exports.
Schedule a chat to find out how much margin your kitchen could recover →
Advanced Considerations and Jelly as an Alternative
Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan represents a capable step up from basic Square, but it carries specific constraints for UK operators. MarketMan pricing starts at $199/month on top of your Square Plus or Premium subscription, and onboarding typically takes 1–2 business days before you can track ingredient costs. Even after setup, dish costing updates depend on invoice data being entered correctly into MarketMan’s supplier portal, which still needs manual work when supplier pricing changes mid-period. The system also lacks an automated price-change alert that flags individual SKU movements and prompts a renegotiation conversation, so many operators only spot margin erosion after running end-of-week reports.
Jelly integrates directly with Square POS and addresses these gaps at a flat rate of £129 per location per month, with no variable user fees and no hidden costs. Where MarketMan relies on manual invoice entry that delays cost updates, Jelly onboarding delivers value within the first week. Once suppliers send invoices to a dedicated Jelly email address or the kitchen photographs them into the app, the Price Alert feature immediately flags every price increase or decrease by ingredient, which provides the automated alert missing from MarketMan. Live dish costing updates automatically as invoices arrive, so a red margin indicator appears the moment a dish becomes unprofitable and removes the delay created by end-of-week reporting.
Jelly’s Sales Mix report, powered by the Square POS integration, shows which dishes are most popular and most profitable at the same time. This combination supports genuine menu engineering instead of guesswork. Jelly users see an average 2-percentage-point improvement in gross margins within the first three months and cut food costs by 3% on average over the same period.
Multi-site restaurant groups often spend significant time consolidating stock reports from different systems. Jelly’s centralised dashboard removes that consolidation step entirely and gives leaders a single, current view of performance across locations.
FAQ: Square, MarketMan, and Jelly
Does Square have inventory management for restaurants?
Square offers two tiers of inventory for restaurants. Basic Square tracks finished menu items and records stock quantities but cannot link a sold dish to its component ingredients. For ingredient-level tracking, Square now offers Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan, launched in April 2026, which adds recipe management, waste logging, automated purchase orders, and ingredient-level cost visibility. This setup requires a Square for Restaurants Plus or Premium subscription, and MarketMan starts at $199/month, with the onboarding timeline mentioned earlier. Operators who need live dish costing integrated with automated invoice scanning and supplier price alerts may find a dedicated platform such as Jelly more cost-effective and faster to deploy.
How do you log waste in Square?
Basic Square has no native waste-logging feature. With the Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan add-on, waste is recorded through the MarketMan portal by selecting an ingredient, entering the quantity discarded, and assigning a reason category such as spoilage, over-preparation, or breakage. This data feeds into variance reports that compare theoretical usage against actual usage. The process requires consistent manual entry after each service, and if entries are missed, variance data becomes unreliable. Jelly’s waste workflow sits directly inside the recipe and inventory module, so waste deductions update dish costs and GP margins in real time without a separate portal login.
What is the downside of using Square for restaurant stock control?
The primary limitation of basic Square is that it tracks finished goods only, so it has no awareness of what ingredients make up a dish and cannot calculate true food cost or gross profit per menu item. Accessing ingredient-level features requires the MarketMan add-on, which adds cost, refers back to the 1–2 business day onboarding period, and introduces a separate portal to manage. Neither Square nor MarketMan provides an automated alert that flags individual ingredient price changes from supplier invoices and prompts action, which creates a critical gap when food and beverage prices are rising. For operators who need live margin visibility, automated invoice processing, and supplier negotiation data in a single system, Square’s inventory stack still needs supplementing with additional tools.
Conclusion: Choosing the Right Stack for Margin Control
Square provides a workable foundation for finished-goods tracking and, with the MarketMan add-on, moves meaningfully toward ingredient-level control. For UK restaurant operators already on Square who need recipe-level costing, automated waste deduction, VAT-compliant COGS reporting, and live margin visibility without weeks of setup or multiple portal logins, Jelly integrates directly with Square POS and delivers all of these capabilities at the flat rate already described.
The operators saving thousands per month, such as Amber in East London, are not doing more admin. They are doing less, with better data arriving automatically.
Book a demo and see how Jelly connects to your Square POS in under a week →