One Source of Truth for a Restaurant Group: POS + ERP + Supplier Invoices

The Starting Point: Three Systems, Three Versions of Reality

A typical multi-location group has a POS platform (Syrve, iiko, or similar) recording sales and shifts, an ERP or accounting package recording purchases and stock, and a steady stream of supplier invoices arriving as PDFs, photos, and paper. Each system is fine on its own. The problems live in the gaps between them.

• Food cost is calculated monthly, manually, and is already outdated when it reaches the owner.
• The same supplier appears under different names in ERP and in the invoice pile, so price changes go unnoticed.
• Menu profitability is a guess, because recipe costs are not linked to actual purchase prices.

Step 1: Capture Every Source Automatically

POS sales flow in through the platform's API. ERP purchases sync on schedule. Supplier invoices — the hardest part — go through AI document extraction: line items, quantities, prices, and VAT are read from PDFs and photos and validated against expected patterns before entering the pipeline.

Step 2: Resolve Entities Across Systems

The pipeline links the same real-world things across sources: "Fresh Foods Ltd", "FreshFoods" and "Fresh Foods (Limassol)" become one supplier; the tomato on the invoice maps to the tomato in the recipe card. This entity resolution step is what makes cross-system questions answerable at all.

Step 3: One Model, Live Answers

What Changes Operationally

• The monthly Excel marathon disappears; reports read from the unified layer.
• Purchasing negotiates from data: price history per supplier per item is one query away.
• Menu engineering becomes a weekly habit instead of an annual project.
• New automations — reorder reminders, invoice approval routing, anomaly alerts — plug into the same layer without new integration work.

Why This Generalizes Beyond Restaurants

The pattern — POS plus ERP plus documents, unified through capture, validation, and entity resolution — applies to retail chains, distributors, and any operation where sales, accounting, and supplier paperwork live in different systems. HoReCa is simply where the pain is most visible, because margins are thin and ingredient prices move weekly.