Compare ingredient prices with Order Guide
About Square Order Guide
Order Guide allows you to compare ingredient prices across all of your food and beverage vendors. Instead of comparing dozens of price sheets and vendor portals, you can quickly find the best price for the ingredients you need.
To use Order Guide, you’ll need a menu in Square and price sheets from your vendors or CSV exports from your vendor portals. Once you upload price sheets and vendor portal exports, Square AI will generate an order guide with groups for each ingredient used in your menu items. Review the Order Guide demo:
Before you begin
PDF, CSV, and XLSX formats are supported for menus, price sheets, and vendor portal uploads. Do not include invoices.
We suggest exporting prices directly from your vendor’s portal. This can typically be done in the "Recent Purchases" and/or "Order History" sections of any vendor's online portal.
Exports (CSV/XLSX) from any vendor’s online portal can be imported into the Order Guide. We have specific importers for several vendors, including Sysco, US Foods, Performance Foodservice, Gordon Food Service, Ben E. Keith, Shamrock, Saladino’s, and Baldor. We’ll be adding more vendor-specific importers over time.
The total item limit in the Order Guide across all menus is 750 items.
Resetting Order Guide does not delete imported menus, vendors, price sheets, and portal exports.
Review the following terms, definitions, and units for ingredients supported with Order Guide:
- Total potential savings: Your average potential savings across all item groups.
- Total items: The number of items in your order guide.
- Total item groups: The total number of groups used to compare item prices.
- Potential savings: Potential savings of the best-priced item when compared to the average price of all other items in this group.
Use the following units in any spreadsheet you upload. Note that the unit must be exactly what’s shown here (for example, you must use gallons and not gallon).
- #10 cans
- bushels
- centimeters
- count
- dozen
- drams
- feet
- fluid drams
- fluid ounces
- gallons
- grams
- half gallons
- inches
- kilograms
- liters
- milliliters
- ounces
- pints
- pounds
- quarts
- yards
Set up Order Guide
Order Guide works by identifying ingredients used in your menu items and then finding prices for those ingredients from vendors you use.
Sign in on your Square Dashboard and navigate to Items & services or Items and menus > Order guide. Review the dropdowns below for instructions.
When you open the Order Guide for the first time, you’ll see an option to import a menu. Order Guide will automatically generate an ingredients list from your menus. Learn how to Create a menu.
To get started:
- Sign in to Square Dashboard and navigate to Items & services or Items and menus > Order guide.
- Click Import menu and select one or more of your menus, or upload a .CSV file that contains your menu.
- Click Submit.
If you don’t have a menu within Square, you’ll need to upload a CSV. The troubleshooting steps for importing items are also useful when importing menus. Learn how to Troubleshoot item library importing.
Upload PDF price sheets or CSV exports from your vendor’s online portal, and convert into our standard format (CSV file). Then you’ll import the standard format CSV file into Order Guide.
To upload PDF price sheets and/or CSV exports from your vendor’s online portal:
- Select Actions > Convert.
- Choose your Input source type (PDF, CSV, or XLSX).
- Select your portal export format.
- If uploading an exported file from your vendor’s online portal, select input source type, and another dropdown (“portal export format”) will appear.
- Select a vendor that appears. If your vendor isn’t on the list, select Other portal export.
- Enter the date for your price sheet or portal export.
- Choose your file.
- Click Submit to convert.
- Once your price sheet or portal export has been converted, click Download to save the standardized CSV to your device.
- Select Next > Import.
- Check the downloaded CSV for accuracy. Open the CSV on your device to ensure that all of the information from your price sheet matches the new columns in the converted spreadsheet.
- Repeat this process for all of your price sheets and portal exports. Make sure each spreadsheet has either a “case price” or an “each price,” but not both.
Once you have the conversion complete, you’ll upload the converted spreadsheet to Square. If you have multiple vendors, each vendor file needs its own CSV.
- Select Actions > Import standard CSV.
- Select your vendor.
- Choose the converted CSV file from your computer to import.
- Click Submit.
If the upload is successful, you’ll see a message saying “CSV uploaded successfully.”
If you see a list of errors, you’ll need to fix those errors in the converted spreadsheet. Refer to the error message to identify which rows in the spreadsheet need to be addressed. Once you’ve fixed the errors, save the file as a CSV and repeat the above steps again.
Once you’ve entered the price sheets or vendor portal exports for all of your vendors, you can generate your full order guide.
- Click Generate. Your order guide will automatically populate all of the item groups.
- Use the Total item groups filter to see the total number of item groups from your imported price sheets or exports.
- Once your order guide has been generated, you can click on any item group to see detailed information about the best prices, quantities available, and delivery dates.
Edit Order Guide
Add a vendor
You can view the vendors you’ve already created by clicking the Vendor filter. To add a vendor:
Sign in to Square Dashboard and navigate to Items & services or Items and menus > Order guide.
Select Actions > Create vendor.
Enter a vendor name.
Click Save.
Continue adding vendors this way until you’ve added every vendor for comparing prices.
To refresh prices for one vendor, go through the Convert > Download > Import flow for any new price sheet or portal export. The prices will automatically refresh in Order Guide.
Reset Order Guide
Resetting your order guide deletes all menus, vendors, price sheets, and portal exports so you can start afresh.
To reset your order guide:
Sign in to Square Dashboard and navigate to Items & services or Items and menus > Order guide.
Select Actions > Reset.
Get support
If you have any questions or need further assistance, ask the Square for Restaurants community. You can also get in touch with our Square Customer Success team by calling (855)-700-6000 or using the messaging feature on your Square Dashboard.