Australian cafes · five founding spots

Your best seller might be your worst earner.

Every week I go through your sales and your supplier bills and tell you what each item on your menu actually earns. Software does the arithmetic. I check it before it reaches you.

Read-only accessYour data stays in AustraliaYou deal with the founder directly
SAMPLE CAFETRUEK · PER SERVE
EGGS YOUR WAY$15.00
GST-$1.36
cost of goods-$1.65
GROSS PROFIT$11.99

Per serve, before labour. Real recipe cost joined to real supplier prices.

Checked by a human

Here is what that looks like

On our sample cafe's menu, avocado toast sells for $25 and eggs on toast sells for $15.

The avocado toast makes $16.09. The eggs make $11.99. So far, no surprise.

But for every dollar the avocado toast takes, the cafe keeps 71 cents. On the eggs it keeps 88 cents.

The cheapest plate on the menu makes more per dollar than the most expensive one.

This is before wages, rent and power. Those come out of the whole week, not out of each plate. What a plate keeps is what pays for them. That is why it is the number to compare two plates on. If you have ever aimed at a 28% food cost, this is the same idea from the other side: the share of each dollar the plate keeps.

Sample cafe, invented for illustration. See the full week.

What each item makes you, and what goes to suppliers

Big Breakfast$22.50 of $29.09
Salmon Bagel$18.70 of $24.55
Avocado Toast$16.09 of $22.73
Eggs Your Way$11.99 of $13.64
Oat Latte$4.63 of $5.91
Long Black$4.30 of $5.00
Flat White$4.06 of $5.00
Gross profit per serve, before labourCost of goods

Sample cafe, invented for illustration. Prices are the menu less GST, which is what revenue means here: the $32 big breakfast is $29.09 of revenue.

What a cafe needs to know

The jobTrueK
What every item on the menu actually earns
Yesterday's numbers in your inbox at 5am
The week analysed every Monday, every move priced in dollars
A supplier price rise caught on the bill it arrives on
Waste as a dollar figure, every week
A stocktake only when the numbers justify the hour
Next week's likely revenue, with its tested error
A person who reads every report before it sends
1 October 2026
Card surcharge ban

Award wages went up in July. The surcharge ban lands 1 October. Every cafe in Australia is about to absorb it or reprice the menu. If you reprice without knowing what each item earns, you are guessing.

Price the ban for one of your items

Why you cannot already know this

You never get the time to do it

Costing the menu, repricing when suppliers move, checking invoices: the cafe never hands you the time, and the work never stays done. TrueK runs it every morning, before you open.

Revenue hides the truth

Your top seller by revenue is rarely your top earner. A busy morning can still be quietly losing you money on the items people order most.

Costs moved this year

Milk, eggs, coffee: supplier prices shift every few weeks. The gross profit you worked out in August is already wrong by September.

Spreadsheets go stale

A costing spreadsheet is accurate for about a day. After that nobody updates it, and nobody trusts it.

Where your prices sit on the street

We have a database of menu prices from Melbourne cafes, built up on foot, board by board.

Connect your sales and your report can say where each of your prices sits against the street: dearer or cheaper, and by how many cents.

What is counted, and what is not

On the billA carton of twelve
Per unitA price per bottle
Per plateThe cost of one flat white

What is counted

  • Every supplier invoice. Each line matched to an ingredient and divided down to a per-unit cost.
  • What you actually paid, over twelve weeks, weighted by how much you bought, so one bad top-up order does not set the price.
  • Wastage, as the gap between what your recipes should have used and what you bought, in dollars.

What is not counted, and why we say so

  • Wages, rent, power and insurance are not in the per-item figures. No one plate causes them. They come off the whole week, and you can enter your wage total on top.
  • Prep time is flagged, not costed. A twenty-minute dish is marked high-prep so it is never oversold to you. We will not invent a dollar figure for it.

A stocktake only when your numbers say so

The gap is watched for free

What your recipes should have used against what you bought, week by week.

  • No one counts anything by default. TrueK watches the gap from data it already has.
  • When it stays large, the Monday report offers a targeted count: the few ingredients carrying the money, in whole packs, on your phone, about an hour. Not the storeroom.
  • When the gap is small, the report says so: a count would cost more of your time than it would find.

What a count can honestly tell you

  1. The first count gives a floorat least this much left without being sold
  2. The second, about a month later, is exactreal usage and real waste, in dollars
  3. Every count is checked before it is trusteda count that looks wrong is queried, not stored

A dropped tray takes ten seconds in the waste log, which moves that much of the gap from unexplained to explained.

Every morning at 5am

What arrives, and when

Tuesday to Sunday: yesterday's numbers. What you sold, what it made you, which part of the day carried it, and any supplier bill that landed. You were behind the machine all day. This is what you missed.

Monday: the whole week, in The Keep. What changed, what it is worth in dollars, every item ranked by what it earns, and any supplier price that moved. One page, sixty seconds, with the detail underneath if you want to dig. A finding that cannot be priced in dollars does not make the page. Next week's likely revenue is there too, with the method's own tested error printed beside it, once your history is deep enough to earn it.

It is the analysis a Big 4 team or a private equity desk runs on a business every month: what each line earns, what moved, and what it is worth in dollars. Pointed at a cafe, and short enough to read with your first coffee.

Checked by a human before it reaches you. Every week.

TrueK · Sample cafe

Monday, the whole week

This week's headlineMilk went up 6% on Tuesday's bill. Across 9 menu items that's about $34 a week, or $1,770 a year if it holds.
Avocado Toast · 63 sold$16.09 a plate
Eggs Your Way · 42 sold$11.99 a plate
Flat White · 434 sold$4.06 a cup
Based on 91% of expected invoices · gross profit shown is before labour

Three minutes to connect

How it starts

  1. Connect your point of sale3 minutes
  2. Connect your books, or skip this and upload your invoices3 minutes
  3. We read two years of your historya few hours
  4. We build your recipes together and you confirm each oneabout two hours
  5. Your first report arrives

Nothing shows a real figure until you have confirmed the recipe behind it. That is why you can trust the numbers that follow.

What you need

Your sales: Square. Your bills: Xero if you use it, or the invoices themselves.

No accounting software? You do not need it. Photograph or upload each supplier invoice in the app and TrueK reads it the same way, with every proposed line shown to you to confirm first. Xero or MYOB only saves you the upload.

Square, Xero and invoice upload work today. MYOB is close. Tell us what you run and we will tell you straight whether it works yet, and what a thinner feed would and would not show you.

What keeps the numbers honest

A person checks every report before it is sent to you

Nothing reaches your inbox until it has been read line by line by the person who built this. That is not a stage we are passing through; it is what you are paying for.

The AI never works out a number

Every dollar figure is calculated in code and can be traced back to the invoice it came from. How that works.

Read-only, always

Everything here operates on read-only access.

Your data stays in Australia

Stored and processed in Sydney. Your cafe's name and your details are never sent to the AI. The one exception is spelled out in our Privacy Policy: email delivery uses an overseas provider.

Nothing is shown as certain that is not

An item without a confirmed recipe says "no cost data". A number that looks wrong is held back until it is checked. Never an estimate dressed up as a real number.

Overseas, tools that do this start at US$350 a month and make you run your whole kitchen through them. TrueK is A$200.

$200 a month

The subscription
$200 /month

$6.60 a day. About one coffee.

Including GST. No setup fee, no contract, cancel any month. Read-only access.

Apply for a founding spot

Five founding spots, invite only. Founding cafes get their own terms, from Daniel directly.

The Repricing Report is $200 as a one-off: your whole menu priced from your own sales before the October surcharge ban. Buy it and then subscribe, and $50 comes off every month you stay.

D

You get me, not a ticket queue

I'm Daniel. I work in corporate finance, pulling apart businesses to find where the money actually goes. TrueK is that discipline pointed at a cafe, because most owners can tell me exactly what came in yesterday, and almost none can tell me the gross profit on their best seller. Not a skill problem: the two systems that hold the answer have never talked to each other. I read every report before it reaches you, and you can call me when something looks off.

See what every item on your menu actually earns.

What to charge. What to cut back. Which supplier to question. Whether to absorb the surcharge ban. You are making these calls anyway; TrueK's job is that you make them knowing the numbers. Five founding spots, directly with the founder.

Or email hello@truek.com.au and tell us about your cafe.