Tinz vs Excel
for your restaurant
Excel is where almost every restaurant owner starts. It works, it's free and it's flexible. The real question is different: does it still pay off once the restaurant grows and the invoices pile up? Here's the honest comparison.
Excel is free and flexible, but it forces you to type everything by hand and never warns you about anything. Tinz reads your invoices for you in 7 seconds, keeps every dish's food cost updated on its own, and warns you when a supplier raises prices. If you spend more than an hour a week entering expenses in Excel, Tinz pays for itself.
Side-by-side comparison
| Feature | Tinz | Excel |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic invoice reading (OCR) | ||
| Food cost per dish updates itself | ||
| Supplier price increase alerts | ||
| Bank reconciliation from a statement PDF | ||
| Automatic order and stock suggestions | ||
| Cash expense logging | ||
| Access from your phone anywhere | Limited | |
| Doesn't depend on formulas that break | ||
| Monthly cost | From €49 | Free |
Typing by hand vs taking a photo
In Excel, every invoice is a row you open, fill in and fill in again: supplier, amount, date, category. Multiply that by dozens of invoices a week and it's hours spent entering data instead of running the restaurant.
In Tinz, you photograph the invoice with your phone and in 7 seconds everything is there: supplier, tax ID, line items, VAT rates and total. Anyone who receives invoices by email forwards them to a single address and never even touches the phone.
Formulas that break vs a margin that's always up to date
In Excel, a dish's food cost is a formula that depends on other cells. When an ingredient's price changes, or someone drags the wrong cell, the numbers stop adding up and nobody notices for months.
In Tinz, each dish's cost recalculates itself with every purchase logged from your invoices. You immediately see, colour-coded, which dishes started losing money when an ingredient went up.
Excel never warns you about anything
A spreadsheet is passive: it only shows what you put into it, and only when you open it. If a supplier raises the price of olive oil by 20%, Excel says nothing.
Tinz warns you when a supplier raises the price of an item above average, when a category spikes compared to your history, and when there are unpaid invoices. Staying in control stops depending on your memory.
Where Excel still wins
Let's be fair: Excel is free and has no limits. If you run a single location, have few invoices a month and like controlling every formula yourself, Excel is more than enough. Tinz starts paying off once the time you spend entering expenses, or the money you lose from missing a price increase, costs more than the subscription.
Tinz vs Excel: common questions
Can I import my Excel file into Tinz?
You don't need to migrate your history formula by formula. Tinz starts from the invoices you photograph or forward. For your dish and ingredient catalogue, you can import XLSX, CSV or PDF files and the AI extracts the data.
Does Tinz fully replace Excel?
For expense control, food cost, suppliers and stock, yes. Some people keep Excel for one-off calculations, but the daily work no longer goes through it.
How much time do I save compared to Excel?
On average, users go from around 20 hours a month of financial management to 2. Reading an invoice drops from about 10 minutes of typing to 7 seconds.
Do I need to know Excel or accounting to use Tinz?
No. If you know how to use a phone, you know how to use Tinz. No formulas, no technical terms, up and running in 10 minutes.
How much does Tinz cost?
From €49/month on the Pro plan, with 14 days free and no card required to try it. Excel is free; the difference is in the time saved and the margin leaks you start catching.
See other comparisons, all the features or the plans and pricing.
Every day without control
is money that never comes back.
14 days free, no card required. Most people see the first results within the first week.
Start with 14 days free