The savings calculator

Use your numbers. Not ours.

Every restaurant software company shows you a savings figure built from an average they invented. This one is built from what you pay. Change any input and watch it move, and every assumption we make is printed on the screen, so you can argue with it.

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Your operation

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Full-service restaurant
Fast casual / QSR
Bar or club
Café or bakery
Catering
Meal prep / ghost kitchen
Multi-unit or franchise
Commissary / central kitchen
Tables, courses, tips. The hardware bill is usually the biggest surprise here.
The number on your merchant statement. It's the single biggest lever here, above $20,000 your platform fee goes to zero.
Picking a kind of place already fills in realistic numbers for everything below, based on operators like yours. Open it up and fix anything that's wrong, that's the whole point of the exercise.
Fine-tune these numbers 9 fields, already filled in
Effective rate, as a %. Take last month's total fees ÷ total card volume × 100. Most operators are between 2.9% and 3.6% once everything is in.
The flat fee on every swipe, on top of the percentage — enter it in dollars, e.g. 0.15 for 15¢. Most operators pay 15 to 20 cents. Culvana charges 10. It looks small and it is not: it is charged on every single transaction.
Card volume divided by the flat fee decides how many transactions you run, and that is what the per-swipe fee is charged on. A coffee shop and a steakhouse doing the same volume pay wildly different flat fees.
POS, inventory, costing, back-office — every subscription added up. Most people forget two.
Culvana reads them. Somebody in your building is typing them in right now.
Weekly stock counts, building orders off par levels, pulling numbers together at month end. Culvana does not delete this work, it does most of it. We assume 70% and leave the rest as a human checking.
Your total food spend. This is the number the whole product exists to protect.
Price creep caught the day it lands, portions costed, dishes repriced before the month closes. We default to a deliberately cautious 1.5%. Set it to 0 if you do not believe us. Everything above still stands on its own.
Manager or bookkeeper rate, loaded. We assume 4 minutes per invoice, typed by hand, that's conservative.

What we're assuming, argue with it

Processing: Culvana bills 2.5% + $0.10 a transaction. We do not guess your transaction count, we work it out from the average ticket you entered, because the flat fee is charged per swipe and a cafe doing $60,000 in $6 coffees pays it ten times more often than a steakhouse doing $60,000 in $90 dinners. Most operators pay 15 to 20 cents a swipe today. We charge 10. On the numbers above that alone is a real line, and we show it separately rather than burying it inside one "processing" figure.

Platform fee: $55 per location per month, waived entirely above $20,000 of monthly card volume per location. Below that it stands, we'd rather show you the line than move it later.

AI usage: billed as you go, roughly $0.30 per invoice read plus a few dollars of questions. We've estimated it from your invoice count and we charge for it, it isn't free, and a calculator that pretended otherwise would be lying to you on the first page.

Labour: 4 minutes to key one invoice by hand, at the wage you entered. If your bookkeeper is faster than that, lower it. We didn't count the time spent chasing a price change nobody noticed, because we can't measure it, but you know it's real.

Hardware: not in the monthly figure at all. It shows separately, as a one-off you don't spend.

The work: we assume Culvana automates 70% of the hours you spend counting stock, building orders off par levels and pulling numbers together at month end. Not 100%: a human still checks a count and approves an order, and any vendor telling you otherwise has never worked a walk-in. Multi-site adds two hours a month per extra location for consolidating P&Ls, which is a cost that does not exist at one site and is invisible on every competitor's calculator.

The margin: the only estimate here we cannot prove in advance, and the one the whole product is for. A vendor raises a price 4%, nobody notices for three weeks, and you sell two thousand plates at the old menu price. We default to recovering 1.5% of purchases, which is deliberately cautious. Set it to zero. The bills alone still pay for us several times over, and we would rather you buy on the number you can verify.

Talk to us

Let's go through your actual statement.

We'll call within a day. Bring last month's merchant statement and we'll check the number above against what you're really paying, that's the whole meeting. No demo theatre.