Stock control and cashing up, in one back office

Count stock on a phone, order from your suppliers by email, scan the delivery note instead of typing it, watch GP move when an ingredient price moves, and close the day with a cashup that rolls up across every site by Monday morning.

14-day free trial, full-featured, no card required. The GP calculator needs no account at all.

A stocktake in a spreadsheet is only ever one number

It tells you what you had on Sunday night. That is genuinely useful for the valuation and completely useless for finding money, because the number that matters is not what you had. It is the gap between what you had and what you should have had. Without a theoretical figure to compare against, a stocktake cannot tell you whether you lost four hundred pounds to over-pouring, to waste, to a short delivery nobody credited, or to the back door.

Zynthio holds a running theoretical level alongside the counted one. Deliveries add to it. Wastage and transfers take from it. Sales deplete it automatically through your recipes. When you count, the variance report puts the two side by side, line by line, and the interesting lines are usually not the ones you expected.

What you stop doing

• Typing a delivery note in by hand — upload it and Zynthio reads the lines
• Rebuilding the same weekly order — save it as a template
• Recosting the menu by hand after a supplier price rise
• Chasing seven sites for their cashup sheets every Monday
• Guessing whether a short delivery was ever actually credited

From the count to the cashup

Counting stock

Stocktakes are created per department, entered line by line on whatever device is to hand, saved as you go, then submitted and completed — and cancelled if the cellar count turns into a farce, which happens. Products can be pulled up by barcode number. Once completed you get a valuation, a variance report against theoretical, a movements report showing every in and out, low stock, and reorder suggestions. Wastage is recorded as its own movement rather than disappearing into the variance, which is the difference between knowing you have a waste problem and merely suspecting it.

Ordering and deliveries

Purchase orders are raised against a supplier, produced as a PDF and emailed to them straight from Zynthio, then received against a goods receipt. If you would rather not type a delivery note in, upload a photo or scan of it and Zynthio extracts the lines for you to check. Credit notes are handled as credit notes rather than as a negative delivery, so short deliveries and returns do not quietly inflate your usage figures. Order templates cover the standing weekly order, approval rules stop a junior committing four cases of langoustine, and the suggestion engine proposes an order from usage history and low-stock thresholds. Suppliers carry a performance score, so you can see who is actually short-delivering.

Recipe costing and GP

Every dish is a recipe, and every recipe costs itself from live ingredient prices. Change what you pay for butter and Zynthio recosts every dish that uses it in bulk, rather than leaving you to find them. Recipes scale, so a batch of forty portions costs correctly rather than being a multiplication somebody did once. GP is worked out on the net selling price with VAT stripped out, which is the correct UK convention. For a quick single-dish or keg check without logging in, the free Zynthio GP calculator does the same maths in the browser, including costing a pint from a keg with allowance for line cleaning and fobbing.

Sales that deplete stock on their own

Map your menu items to recipes once and sales do the rest. Zynthio explodes each sold item to its leaf ingredients and deducts them with proper unit conversion — a 175ml glass comes off a 750ml bottle as 175ml, not as a bottle. It can suggest the mappings rather than making you build every one by hand. Add batch and expiry tracking with a daily sweep, quarantine for anything held back, inter-site transfers so stock moving between venues is recorded once, and usage-based forecasting that runs overnight.

Cashing up, and the week after it

The day ends on the cashup: takings by tender, payouts, covers, and labour pulled through from the rota and recalculated on demand, with a photo of the receipts or the Z-read attached. Cashups are submitted, and can be unapproved or reset if something was wrong rather than quietly overwritten. From there Zynthio rolls the week up per site and across the whole organisation and emails the summary, so an area manager reads one email on Monday instead of chasing seven spreadsheets. Where an EPOS is connected, takings arrive by themselves; where ZynthioEPOS is running, the Z-read posts itself into the cashup.

Built for more than one site

Suppliers and products are assigned per site, so a group can run different suppliers in different towns without maintaining two systems. People can be allocated across several sites. Reporting exists at both site and organisation level, and the same sites carry your food safety records, rotas and training, which means one list of venues rather than four systems each with its own slightly different list.

Stock and cashup questions

Does Zynthio deduct stock from sales automatically?

Yes, once two things are in place: each menu item is mapped to a recipe, and each recipe lists its ingredients with units. After that, closing a sale explodes the recipe down to its leaf ingredients and deducts them with proper unit conversion, so a 175ml glass comes off a 750ml bottle as 175ml rather than as a bottle. Zynthio can suggest the menu-to-recipe mappings for you rather than making you build every one by hand.

Can I do a stocktake on a phone or a tablet?

Yes. The stock pages work in a mobile browser, so a count can be done walking the cellar with a phone instead of a clipboard and a retype afterwards. Counts are entered line by line against a department, saved as you go, then submitted and completed, and you can pull a product up by its barcode number. Counts stay editable until they are completed, so an interrupted stocktake is not a lost one.

What does cashing up in Zynthio involve?

Each site completes a daily cashup: takings by tender, payouts, covers, and labour pulled through from the rota and recalculated on demand, with a photo of the receipts or the Z-read attached. The cashup is submitted, and can be unapproved or reset if something was wrong. Zynthio then rolls the week up per site and across the whole group and emails the weekly summary, so an area manager is not chasing seven spreadsheets every Monday.

Does Zynthio integrate with Xero, Sage or QuickBooks?

No. There is no direct accounting integration today, and we would rather say so than imply one. Purchase orders, goods receipts, cashups and stock valuations export as PDFs, and the underlying data is reachable through the API for anyone building their own feed. Most operators run Zynthio for the operational numbers and hand their bookkeeper the exports.

How does Zynthio work out gross profit?

Recipe costing runs from live ingredient prices, so changing what you pay for butter recosts every dish that uses it, in bulk across the whole book. GP is calculated on the net selling price with VAT stripped out, which is the correct UK convention and the most common place a menu goes wrong. If you want to sanity-check a single dish or a keg right now without an account, our free GP calculator does exactly that in the browser.

Related guides

Practical guides from the Zynthio team on this part of running a venue.

The free GP calculator for accurate menu pricing

A GP calculator works out true dish and drink margins on the price left after VAT, in about a minute per item, then blends the whole menu.

Weekly stock counts and the fast route to real GP margin

Weekly stock counts turn a GP problem into a specific week, delivery or line you can check, rather than a monthly mystery.

Reducing food waste in hospitality: a stock control guide

Reducing food waste starts with accurate stock counts and clear reason codes, not guesswork. Here is how UK venues cut waste and protect margin.

More operator guides on the Zynthio blog. How we write them: editorial policy.

One login, one bill, one set of sites

Every Zynthio module shares the same sites, the same people and the same reporting. Turn on what you need.

Martyn’s Law Readiness

Procedure templates, a per-site capacity and tier view, a quarterly drill record and a staff briefing.

Zero-Hours Readiness

Guaranteed hours, shift notice and cancellation payment policies, plus the rota record that evidences them.

Food Safety & HACCP

Digital daily checks, temperature logs, HACCP plans, allergen charts and EHO-ready PDF records.

Rotas, Clock-In & HR

Build rotas against a live labour budget, clock staff in with geofencing, approve timesheets.

EPOS & Till

Connect your existing till for live sales into stock and rotas, plus the ZynthioEPOS till in build.

HACCP Plans

Build a full Codex HACCP plan online, link CCPs to daily checks and export EHO-ready PDFs.

COSHH & Risk Assessments

Substance register with data sheets and PPE, plus scored venue risk assessments with sign-off.

Audits & Mock EHO

Ten UK templates, 400+ inspector-style questions, weighted scoring and a site league table.

Staff Training

Assign courses, track completion by person and site, and issue certificates into the HR file.

Review Management

Google, TripAdvisor and your FSA rating in one dashboard with a reputation score per site.

Table Bookings

Website booking widget, live service diary, deposits and a guest CRM - no per-cover fees, ever.

Refusals Register

A digital refusals book filled from the till, ready for the licensing officer.

Cash Management

Safes, floats, banking and an append-only ledger with daily cash-up reconciliation.

Accounting Export

The daily sales journal, supplier bills and payroll journal in Xero’s own import layouts.

KPIs & Reporting

Clock-in accuracy, labour budget, salary utilisation and reputation, per site and per group.

Recipe Costing

Cost dishes from live stock prices, track GP ex-VAT and tag all 14 UK allergens.

Free GP Calculator

Cost a dish, cost a keg by the pint, or price to a target GP. No account needed, VAT handled properly.

Or start at the beginning on the Zynthio homepage, try it with sample data on the live demo, or read practical operator guides on the blog.

Find out where the stock is going

Start a full 14-day free trial on every site, or look around the demo with a stocked sample restaurant already in it. No card, no sales call to get in.