How to Automate Toast
Toast automates the restaurant it can see. Online ordering feeds the same kitchen queue, Toast Payroll turns clocked hours into a pay run, and xtraCHEF prices recipes from supplier invoices. What sits outside is the bank, the delivery marketplaces and the distributor's portal, and reading those is where an agent like WebRun earns its keep.
Written by
Yara Haddad
Data operations
Reviewed by
Elliot Nakamura
Platform writer
Toast stopped being a till and became the back office
Toast is a restaurant point of sale, and by now that description undersells it. The terminals and handhelds take the orders, but the same platform runs Toast Online Ordering, Toast Payroll and Team Management, Toast Loyalty, a Kitchen Display System, Toast Tables for reservations, and xtraCHEF by Toast for invoices and food cost. Plenty of restaurants on it run almost nothing else.
Which means Toast holds the numbers that decide whether a restaurant is actually a business. Net sales and covers. Product mix, down to how many of Tuesday's special left the pass. Labour hours against the shifts that were rostered. Voids, comps and discounts, by employee. Tips, by server. What got 86'd, and when.
That is an unusually complete record for an industry running on a few percent. It is also a record almost nobody has time to read, because the people who could act on it are on the floor from eleven until midnight.
The numbers that decide the week live in six places
A restaurant's margin is not settled at the till. It is settled by a handful of things that all sit somewhere else.
The distributor's price for chicken thighs this week, on a portal that shows it and nothing more. The delivery marketplaces, each with its own dashboard, its own commission and its own idea of what yesterday was worth. The bank, where the card deposit either matches the day or does not. The linen supplier's invoice sitting unopened in an inbox. Last night's reviews.
So the manager's morning is a lap. Open Toast, write down yesterday's net sales. Open the bank, check the deposit. Open two delivery dashboards, add those in. Open the inbox, find the invoice, notice a price went up, and work out whether the dish still stands at its menu price.
It takes forty minutes on the days when nothing is wrong. It gets skipped on the days when something is.
Toast can only report the sales it rang up
Toast automates a serious amount of the restaurant, and the reporting is genuinely good.
Toast Online Ordering drops web orders straight into the same kitchen queue, with no second tablet on the counter. Toast Payroll and Team Management turns hours clocked on the terminal into a pay run and handles tip distribution. Toast Loyalty and the built-in email marketing bring guests back off the guest data the till already collected. xtraCHEF by Toast reads supplier invoices, prices recipes and reports food cost, which is further into the back office than most point of sale ever reaches.
Set all of that up and a real amount of paperwork does disappear.
The limit is what Toast can see. It reports the sales it rang up, the hours clocked on its own terminals and the invoices you fed to xtraCHEF. It does not open the distributor's portal to notice a price changed before the invoice arrives. It does not read the delivery marketplace's dashboard, or the bank, or the review sites, or the health inspection result. Each one of those is a login, a screen, and a number somebody copies across by hand.
Every plate sold can be priced against what it cost today
Give something the ability to open all of those, and the morning lap becomes a report that is already written.
Yesterday's net sales, covers and product mix, next to the deposit that hit the bank, with the difference named rather than found on Friday. The delivery marketplace totals added to the Toast totals, so the day's real revenue is one number and the commission is visible in it. The dishes whose ingredient cost moved this week, set against their current menu price, so the ones no longer paying are flagged before the next menu goes to print.
Then the things nobody gets to. Labour cost against net sales, shift by shift, with the ones that ran over target listed. Voids and comps grouped by employee. The items on the 86 list matched against what is on order, so the same thing does not run out again on Saturday. Last night's guest feedback and reviews, read and sorted, with anything naming a member of staff pulled out first.
The rule is the one that already applies behind the pass. Opening those screens, setting one number against another and listing what does not match can run unattended. Placing an order with a distributor, answering a guest in public or changing a price on the menu is a decision, and it stays with a person.
The lap of the dashboards does not need a manager
Those forty minutes are not a management skill. Deciding what to do about what they turn up is.
WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Toast, reads the prior day's sales, labour and product mix, then opens the bank, the delivery dashboards and the distributor's portal, and lines all of it up in one place, posted wherever your team already looks.
It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything that spends money or answers a guest is drafted and waits for you.
The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.
Questions people ask
Where does this start and xtraCHEF stop?
xtraCHEF handles the invoices you send it, and prices your recipes off them. This covers the step before and after: reading the distributor's portal for a price that changed before any invoice arrives, and comparing the result against what Toast says you charge.
What happens if a manager is mid-service when it finds something?
It posts where your team already looks, and each workflow decides what is worth interrupting for. Most run before open or after close and land as a digest. Only the urgent ones, like a register that dropped offline, are written to be read during service.
Could it change a menu price or void a check?
No. Menu changes, voids, comps and refunds are deliberately kept behind a person. It will show you the dish that stopped making money and what it would need to charge, and leave the change to whoever owns the menu.
16 ready-made Toast workflows
Each one names the apps it touches and the exact steps it takes. Open one to read what it will do, then turn it on.
Want one of these running on your own Toast?
Show WebRun the process once and it will run it on schedule, in your own private browser environment.