The Purchase Report is where you go to answer the question: “What have we actually been buying, and what did it cost?” It breaks everything down by product, so you can track costs, catch price increases, and compare spending across locations.
What’s covered here
- What the Purchase Report is and when to use it
- What you’ll see and how to navigate it
- How to compare purchases across locations
- Exporting and sharing your report
- Pro tips for getting the most out of it
What is the Purchase Report?
The Purchase Report gives you a detailed, product-level view of every purchase in your company — pulled directly from your invoices. If it’s been entered into Garde, it shows up here.
It’s best for:
- Seeing exactly what you’re buying by product or vendor
- Comparing pricing across locations or vendors
- Spotting spikes in quantity or price over time
- Tracking total purchase history of specific categories or items
Note: This report shows purchasing activity only. It’s based on what was bought, not what was used. For inventory-adjusted reporting or actual food cost, use the Category Report or Controllable P&L instead.
To access it, go to Products > Purchase Report
What you’ll see
When you select a timeframe, the Purchase Report shows the following for each product:
- Restaurant that purchased it
- Category type and category it belongs to
- Quantity purchased
- Total amount spent
- Weighted average cost
Filter by
- Time Period: Choose from preset options or select a custom date range.
- Categories: Filter by any of your category types or categories.
- Units: If you’re part of a multi-unit group, you can:
- View all purchases across locations as a single data set
- Break it down by individual unit
- Filter to a subset of locations for side-by-side comparisons (e.g., compare milk prices in your Chicago location vs. New York)
Products and Vendor Items
Click any product row to see the specific vendor items that rolled up to that product during the selected timeframe.
From the pop-up, you can also click “View product” to dig deeper — including all past orders for that product across every vendor.
Multi-unit comparison
The Purchase Report makes it straightforward to compare pricing across your stores. It includes all purchase data within your Company-Concept, meaning only invoice data from units in the same concept and company shows up.
You can:
- View purchases across all locations as a single data set
- Compare a few units side-by-side
- Drill into an individual location for deeper analysis
Exporting the Report
To export:
- Click the Export As button at the top of the page.
- Choose between CSV or PDF.
Your export respects all the filters you’ve applied, so you’ll share exactly the data you’re looking at.
Pro Tips
- Check pricing regularly. Pull this report monthly (or even weekly) to compare product costs across time, vendors, or locations. Price creep is real, and this is how you catch it early.
- Keep mappings clean. Make sure your vendor items are correctly mapped to products. Bad mappings mean bad data.
- Need usage data? This report shows purchases only. For usage or inventory-adjusted data, check out the Category Report.
Use this report during vendor negotiations. Before you sit down with a vendor to renegotiate pricing, pull the Purchase Report filtered to that vendor’s products. You’ll have hard numbers on volume, average cost, and price trends — exactly the kind of data that strengthens your position at the table. If you run multiple locations, compare what each location is paying for the same item. Inconsistencies can be great leverage.
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