LineSweepLineSweep learns how you work.
Not the other way around.
Connect your invoices once. LineSweep automatically tracks your food and beverage costs, from produce to liquor, catches price changes, and shows you what's worth paying attention to. No spreadsheets, no daily data entry, and no new software routine.
Upload invoices yourself, or forward them by email. You, your bookkeeper, or your distributor's invoice emails can all send to your private LineSweep address. Works with any distributor, from clear PDFs or photos.
How it works
Send your invoices
Upload them, or forward them from your inbox to your private LineSweep address. No scanner, no software to set up.
LineSweep reads every line
Item, price, pack size, category — pulled automatically, no manual entry, no spreadsheets.
You get the answers
A running price history for everything you buy, an alert when something jumps, and a plain-English review every month, checked by Ryan before it reaches you.
What you get
Invoice processing
Upload it or forward it by email. LineSweep reads every line, with no manual entry.
Price tracking, per item
Every price you've ever paid for every item, food or liquor, beer and wine, by distributor, so you catch a creep or a swap before it costs you.
Price alerts
When a price jumps, it's flagged on your dashboard as soon as the invoice is processed.
A monthly review
What moved, what's worth a look, and what to do. Ryan checks every review against your invoices before it reaches you.
Ask LineSweep
Ask about your prices, spend and recipes in plain English, for food, liquor, beer and wine, and what you're on pace to spend once you have a few months of invoices. No reports to dig through.
Recipe & cocktail costing, built in
Build a recipe or a cocktail once — ingredients, ounces, dashes — and LineSweep prices it from your own latest invoices, bottle by bottle, every time you open it.
Inventory & waste tracking
Optional counts and a waste log, there when you're ready for them — never required to get value from day one.
Pricing
One price for everything above. Built for a single location, priced for one.
- Every invoice read and tracked, with no data entry from you
- Price history and alerts for every item
- A monthly review, checked by Ryan before it reaches you
- Recipe & cocktail costing, priced from your own invoices
- Inventory & waste tracking, if you want them
- $50/month for each additional location
More of what it does
Every price tracked, every change caught, and a review checked before it reaches you. Here's what that looks like. Scroll for more.
Built by Ryan Nielsen, who ran restaurant kitchens and got tired of guessing what invoices actually cost — for any restaurant, not just the ones down the street from him.
Common questions
What's a good food cost percentage for a restaurant?
It depends on the concept, but many full-service restaurants aim for roughly 28–35% of food sales. The trend matters more than any single month: a percentage that creeps up a point or two usually means supplier prices moved before your menu prices did.
How do I calculate food cost?
Beginning inventory plus purchases, minus ending inventory, gives your food cost for the period. Divide that by food sales for the same period to get your food cost percentage. Purchases alone aren't food cost; the inventory counts are what make the number accurate.
How can I tell when my supplier prices go up?
Compare what you paid for each item with the last time you bought it, in the same pack size. LineSweep does that for every line on every invoice, keeps the history, and flags anything that jumps on your dashboard.
Do I have to count inventory to use LineSweep?
No. Price tracking, alerts and the monthly review all come from your invoices alone. Inventory counts and waste tracking are there if you want an actual food and beverage cost percentage, but you never need them to get started.
Which suppliers does it work with?
Any supplier that sends you an invoice. Invoices from Sysco, Baldor and Native Maine Produce are recognized directly, and invoices from other suppliers, like US Foods or Performance Foodservice, are read too, including liquor, beer and wine distributors.
Does LineSweep track liquor, beer and wine too?
Yes. Invoices from liquor, beer and wine distributors are read the same way as food: every bottle, case and keg, with price history and alerts. Liquor, beer and wine are totaled separately, so you can see what you spend on each, and cocktails can be costed by the ounce from your own bottle prices. A beverage cost percentage needs your counts and sales, which are optional.
How does the free trial work?
Your 30 days start when your first invoice is processed, so setting up and waiting for invoices doesn't use any of it. No card is needed. After the trial it's $79/month for one location, plus $50/month for each additional location.
About LineSweep
LineSweep is built by a former executive chef — not handed to your kitchen as more software to maintain, but built to run the invoice and cost tracking itself.
I thought restaurants needed better software. They needed less work.
I originally built LineSweep because I thought restaurants needed better software for managing purchasing, inventory, and food and beverage cost.
After building it and working with restaurant data myself, I realized the bigger problem wasn't the software — it was the amount of administrative work we expect chefs and operators to do in the first place.
So instead of building a tool you have to run, LineSweep reads your invoices and tracks your prices automatically, and I check your monthly review myself before it reaches you. The back-office work is done for you, not handed to you.
The easiest restaurant software to use is the software you don't have to use.
Start with real purchasing data, automate the back office directly, and only ask the restaurant for what nobody else could supply — a count on the shelf, a note on what got wasted, a question asked in plain language.
I built LineSweep around the problems I ran into as an executive chef: vendor prices that changed without anyone noticing, purchasing information scattered across invoices, inventory setup that took days, and the gap between receiving an invoice and actually learning from it. Want more than the automated version? Consulting — inventory restructuring, hands-on project work — is a separate, paid option.