Made by coffee shop owners, for coffee shop owners
Sales, stock, waste, ordering, shifts and records, run for you in the background every day, with no files to upload. Focus on your goals, not tedious operations.
A day in the shop
Five moments in a cafe's week, and what Cortado does in each.
6:40am · The counter
Every item wears a printed QR code. Scanning opens a one-tap update on whoever's phone is nearest. No app to install, no login to share, no clipboard to lose.
2% milk
Walk-in, left shelf
6 L
Under the 10 you keep on hand, so it's on Thursday's order, 2 cases.
Tap one, it's the whole job.
8:15am · Service
Connect Square and each sale takes what went into it off the shelf within seconds, the oat swap and the extra shot included. Nobody counts the milk to know how much is left.
Paid at the counter, 8:14am
Taken off the shelf, seconds later
The oat swap and the extra shot included. No Sync button.
2:30pm · Waste
Toss something and you log why. The app turns it into money at what you last paid, so the pastry case is a number you can act on instead of a feeling that something's off.
Down 41% since the Saturday order was trimmed
5:00pm · Ordering
Set how much you like to keep on hand, and anything below it becomes a real order list, grouped by supplier and priced at what you last paid. Check what you want and see what it will cost before you send it.
Priced at what you last paid
Tap a line to add or drop it.
Sunday · The week
Cortado reads eight weeks of your sales and suggests next week's schedule: two on for the morning rush, one for the quiet afternoon, everyone inside the hours they gave you. It lands on their calendars.
Items an hour, from eight Tuesdays
Revolutionizing how a coffee shop runs
Every tool a shop owner buys hands them another screen to fill in. We've stood behind the counter, so we built the opposite: Cortado takes the work off your list. Your POS reports in on its own, stock comes off the shelf drink by drink, the week files itself, and the numbers are waiting before you unlock the door.
As it happens
Square
Every sale arrives on its own, and the milk, beans and cup behind it come off the shelf with it.
Every morning
Toast
Cortado collects Toast's nightly files for you. Yesterday is in before you open, with nothing to download or upload.
Every Monday
Last week, done
Filed in your archive with sales, costs, hours, tips, waste and every fridge check, summed up in your inbox, and kept for as long as you're with us.
Measured in what changes
1 tap
to update a count
From locked phone to logged, behind the counter
$0
of guesswork on waste
Every entry priced at what you actually paid
2 weeks
of local events, researched
Games, festivals and weather near your address
Will it pay for itself?
Three questions, with a guess already in each. It only counts waste and time, uses the low end of every published figure, and shows its working.
Your shop
Sales in a typical week
$10,000
What you sell
Hours a week on stock, ordering and the rota
5.5 hrs
4 to 10% is typical. Starts at 4%.
Starts at a quarter.
Starts at half.
Your month with Cortado
You'd get back about
$428
for $79 a month. It pays for itself in 6 days.
Cortado Shop
Less waste. 4 to 10% of the food restaurants buy is thrown away. At 4% of your $13,000 a month in ingredients (typically 25 to 35% of sales), that's $520. Pricing every bin entry and ordering only what you need stops 25% of it.
Time back. Counts take seconds, the order list writes itself, invoices are read from a photo and the rota is built for you. 50% of your 5.5 hours is 2.8 hours a week at $25. Building the rota alone takes managers about 2.6 hours a week.
Left out. Drink prices that fall behind costs, running out mid-rush, and the records a health inspector asks for. Real, but hard to price fairly.
An estimate from industry figures and your answers, not a promise. Your real numbers show up on your Numbers page after a few weeks.
What's in it
One place for the six things a shop does every week, done properly and joined up.
Scan to count
A printed code on every shelf. Point a phone at it, tap once, done. Nothing to install and no login to pass around.
Sales that count stock
Connect Square, or let Cortado collect Toast's nightly files, and say what a drink is made of once. Every sale after that takes the milk, the beans and the cup off the shelf, oat swaps and extra shots included.
Waste, priced
Log what you threw out and why. It becomes a dollar figure at what you last paid, tracked week over week.
Supplier research
Ask it to look for roasters and dairies near you. Real businesses, real sources, no invented prices.
Menu import
Point it at your website, or photograph the menu on the wall. It reads it and proposes your item list for review.
Schedules from your sales
Get next week's schedule suggested from your own busy hours, synced to everyone's Google Calendar, with what's on nearby that will change how busy you are.
Not just coffee
Coffee
Beans by the pound, milk by the gallon, and every shot and pour costed, down to the oat milk swap.
Boba & milk tea
Pearls, loose-leaf tea, creamer, sealing film and wide straws in the catalog. Milk tea and brown sugar boba costed the way suppliers sell them.
Matcha
Matcha by the gram, latte and ceremonial grade, so a $6.50 iced matcha latte shows what it really keeps.
Why we're building it
“The clipboard by the walk-in has been there for eleven years. It's gone.”
“I want to know what the pastry case costs me on a Tuesday, not a feeling that it's a lot.”
“Ordering happens at 5pm when I'm tired. That's exactly when I get it wrong.”
“Nobody wants another app. They want the thing on the shelf to just work.”
“The clipboard by the walk-in has been there for eleven years. It's gone.”
“I want to know what the pastry case costs me on a Tuesday, not a feeling that it's a lot.”
“Ordering happens at 5pm when I'm tired. That's exactly when I get it wrong.”
“Nobody wants another app. They want the thing on the shelf to just work.”
How it behaves
This handles what a shop buys, throws out and pays people to do. Four rules it holds to.
Still deciding
It knows what Cortado does and, just as importantly, what it doesn't do yet.
Answers come from the product itself, including what it doesn't do yet.
Set up one location, print your codes, and count your first shelf this afternoon.
Rather not do it yourself?
Tell us about your shop and we'll walk you through it, or turn up, print your labels and count your first shelf with you. It takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing.