Frequently Asked Questions
WookAI is $250/month for the first location and $150/month for each additional location. 2 months free if you sign up for 1 year. The first 30 days are free, and we have a no-questions-asked, money back guarantee if you’re unsatisfied for any reason.
Many customers save thousands of dollars a week in each location. The amount of your savings depends on your order volumes and how many different items you order. However, even for lighter order volumes, it’s possible to save 20% or more per week on your food order.
For large restaurant groups with sophisticated contracts and a primary supplier, there are still hidden savings. Other tools can tell you how prices change from week-to-week on your invoices, but the reality is that these are commodities where most items have daily market-driven price changes. WookAI can unlock savings by conducting a no-up-front-cost audit of your supplier. We look at the supplier’s buying prices compared to what you were charged and validate you are getting the deal you deserve. While there is no guarantee anything will be found, we have typically found $10,000+ per location in over-charges.
For smaller groups without a lot of buying power, the short answer is you really should consider multiple suppliers. WookAI makes it easy for new suppliers to set up your order guide and price lists. Many items will meet your standards across grocery, primary ingredients, and paper goods. For many restaurant concepts, you will be able to comparison shop 100% of your items. You want the suppliers to fight for your business every week instead of just once.
For large restaurant groups with sophisticated contracts and a primary supplier, there are still hidden savings. Other tools can tell you how prices change from week-to-week on your invoices, but the reality is that these are commodities where most items have daily market-driven price changes. WookAI can unlock savings by conducting a no-up-front-cost audit of your supplier. We look at the supplier’s buying prices compared to what you were charged and validate you are getting the deal you deserve. While there is no guarantee anything will be found, we have typically found $10,000+ per location in over-charges.
For any restaurant WookAI reduces the time it takes to do your on-hand order count and to place your order from 2 hours plus down to as little as 20 minutes. WookAI also gives you dynamic par levels based on your projected sales to give you confidence that you are not ordering too much or too little of any product. WookAI also gives you menu costing, cost of goods reporting, prep planning and more.
WookAI can read pricing from virtually any source. Even small, local vendors, and some farmers markets are often willing to provide a spreadsheet with pricing. WookAI can read pricing from spreadsheets, web pages, PDFs, CSV files, and many more sources.
WookAI is very simple to set up. We start with your item list, meaning the things that you buy every week. Then we take your item list and match each item to the corresponding SKUs at each of your suppliers. To set up an item list with 150 items, you should expect an hour to an hour and half of work. For each supplier, it’s also about an hour to an hour and half of one-time setup work.
Easy to use, free, self-setup tools: If you’re pretty organized you can set up WookAI yourself starting with a one-hour kickoff call with one of our experts and our easy-to-use tools and on-line guided set-up videos.
Expert set-up done for you: If you want us to do the work for you, we’ll need some of your guidance on how your restaurant counts inventory, and some insight into what systems you have – even if it’s paper-and-pencil. Depending on how many items and suppliers you have this will likely cost $1,000 – $2,000 dollars.
Most 3rd parties and other restaurant software platforms monitor prices changes based on your invoices – after you’ve already placed your order(s). Prices on most of your food items legitimately change almost every week, because the market price for food like eggs, cheese and virtually everything else changes from week to week.
Because an invoice-based system is constantly alerting you to legitimate price changes, it’s almost training you not to look for the potentially illegitimate price changes. Even when you find unfair price changes, you have to do something about it. WookAI compares your price on every item every time you order and places the order for that item with the supplier who has the lowest cost – so you always have the best price before you place the order.
No Risk Audit – Consider an audit of your supplier(s). Third parties often negotiate your contract and monitor pricing, they may also audit contract pricing and rebates with manufactures. However, if your contract has “cost plus” pricing from the supplier, it gets very complicated very quickly to audit the supplier’s cost without a sophisticated tool like WookAI. This is a service we offer, there’s no risk to you, you don’t pay anything unless we find something in your favor.
Simple Inventory and order process – WookAI gives you tools to simply count on-hand inventory and place your orders. Many restaurants tell us doing these two things took them 2 hours every week before WookAI, now they’re doing both in 20 minutes. WookAI also gives you dynamic par levels based on your sales projections, giving you the confidence you’re not ordering too much or too little.
We’ll start by understanding the seasonality of your business. At a high level for each season, or for the whole year if your business not seasonal, we’ll look at your total sales for the season compared to how much of each product you purchased during that time. This is a great starting point, but over time through WookAI’s reporting you’ll be able to make adjustments so that you’re even more precise – you can even have different par levels for different days of the week if for example you find that the weekend crowd buys more appetizers than the weekday customers.
Yes. Let’s say today every delivery is 50 cases and it takes you two hours to check-in and store the inventory. Maybe tomorrow you have two trucks each bringing you 25 cases of product. It will take a tiny bit longer because you’ll talk to two drivers, but the rest of the process should be identical. Most drivers are actually used to coordinating with each other to speed up their own routes. Isn’t it worth a few extra minutes to save thousands of dollars a week?
WookAI has robust cost of goods and menu costing capabilities. Manage your food costs by categories that you define, like protein, dairy, dry goods and more. Set up your menu items by ingredients and see real-time menu costing and ideal menu prices based on your current price list instead of last month’s invoices.