Compare ingredient prices with Order Guide
About 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. Proceed with the next steps to upload your vendor price sheets and create your personalized order guide.
Upload price sheets from vendors
Upload price sheets from your vendors (or an exported PDF, CSV, or XLSX file from a vendor portal), and we’ll match them to your ingredient list. Note: You can always update prices or add more price sheets at a later time.
After you have uploaded your vendor files, the vendor names will be broken down into lists. Confirm your vendor names are correct and edit the names if needed.
Create your Order Guide
Click Generate Order Guide.
Wait 1-2 minutes for your new order guide to complete. You will receive a notification email once Order Guide is generated.
Review your order guide on Square Dashboard. 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.
Add vendors
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.