Garvold Getting started

Built for chefs, by a chef.

Getting your numbers in

About 40 minutes, spread over a week if you like. Bring your list of ingredients straight out of your spreadsheet — but not the prices beside them.

Start with what you are cooking this week. Not last year, not everything in the storeroom. Three dishes and one delivery note is enough for Garvold to start telling you something you did not already know.

Everything after that goes in as you work, not in a sitting.

Bring the list, not the prices. Your list of ingredients is worth having. The prices next to it are out of date — that is why you are here — so Garvold leaves them where they are and takes its prices from your next delivery instead.

Have these in front of you

No account numbers, no logins, nothing from your accountant.

The order to do it in

  1. Name your suppliers 5 minutes

    Just the names. Who you buy meat from, who brings the dry goods, the cash and carry you use when something runs out.

  2. Bring in the things you buy 5 minutes

    Open your spreadsheet, copy the rows, and paste them in. Or choose the file. Garvold reads the names, and the unit and category if your sheet has them — "lbs" and "LB", "Veg" and "Meat", it knows what those mean.

    It shows you exactly what it is about to add before it adds anything. Where a sheet says something like "50lb sack" it stops and asks, because that can mean the sack or the pound and the two give different costs.

    It ignores any price column, on purpose. See below.

  3. Enter your last delivery note 10 minutes

    Line by line, what came and what it cost. Then photograph the note with your phone and it stays attached to those lines, so months later you can see the paper behind the number.

    This is the step where the system stops being empty. Those are now your real prices.

  4. Write up three dishes 20 minutes

    The three you sell most. What goes in, how much of each, and how many people it serves. Garvold works out what each one costs you per head, using the prices from the note you just entered.

    If it cannot cost a line, it says so rather than guessing. A number that is quietly wrong is worse than a gap you can see, because you would quote on it.

  5. Then stop 0 minutes

    That is enough to price a job properly. Everything else arrives as you work: a client when you quote one, a temperature when you cook, a price when the next truck comes.

Why it reads your list but not your prices

It can see the price column. It leaves it alone deliberately.

Those prices are out of date, and the gap between what you think a dish costs and what it costs today is the whole reason for this. Loading them would put the same wrong number back into the one calculation that has to be right — and give it the authority of having come from the system rather than from a sheet you last touched in March.

So prices come from the truck. The first time you enter a note, every dish using those ingredients recosts itself — and from then on it keeps up on its own, without you maintaining anything.

What Garvold cannot do for you yet

Said plainly, so you are not waiting for something that is not there:

If any of that is what would make the difference for you, say so when you apply. It is the kind of thing that decides what gets built next.

If your list runs past a thousand rows, or it is spread over a dozen sheets that do not agree with each other, send it over with your last few delivery notes and we will sort it out with you, then hand it back ready to use.

Ask about this when you apply. It is not part of the free pilot.

It stays yours

Whatever you put in, you can take out again — every supplier, price, recipe and temperature reading, in one file, whenever you ask. Nobody else using Garvold can see any of it.

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