Guides
Restaurant ordering and forecasting guides
Practical guides on ordering, sales-history exports, and how demand forecasting actually works — written for people who run kitchens, with the arithmetic shown.
POS and data export7 min read
How to export your sales history from Lightspeed Restaurant
Export Lightspeed Restaurant's Product Mix Report as a CSV, one calendar month at a time, and combine the quantities into a monthly sales history.
Read it →POS and data export8 min read
How to export your sales history from Toast
Find Toast’s Product mix report, export sales by month, understand its quantity and modifier settings, and combine the results for forecasting.
Read it →Waste and cost8 min read
The two ways ordering by feel goes wrong (and why you only hear about one)
Under-ordering can become a public stockout review. Over-ordering can disappear into the waste bin. See the arithmetic and a practical way to check both.
Read it →How the forecasting works9 min read
Safety stock for restaurants: why a flat 20% buffer is the wrong answer
A flat safety-stock percentage treats every ingredient alike. See how StocksSense sizes the buffer from each product's reliability and demand.
Read it →How the forecasting works8 min read
What three months of sales history can and cannot tell you
Three months can show a starting level and direction. Learn what a short sales history supports, what it cannot prove, and how to use the forecast carefully.
Read it →POS and data export7 min read
How to export your sales history from Square
The exact Square Dashboard path to a CSV of item sales, which report to pick, what date range to use, and how to reshape it into a forecastable file.
Read it →The ordering decision11 min read
How much should a restaurant order? A worked example
One product, one year of sales, and the whole ordering decision done by hand — average, trend, seasonality, and the buffer you cannot calculate from one year.
Read it →How the forecasting works9 min read
Holt-Winters, explained for people who run kitchens
The forecasting method behind most demand software, in plain language: level, trend and seasonality, what each one does to your order, and what none of them can see.
Read it →Every guide here is written to be useful whether or not you ever use StocksSense. If a figure is a model or an assumption rather than a measurement, it says so in the sentence. Published August 30, 2026 onward.