topic Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ? in Back Office & Team

How Are You Using Toast IQ?

Rob — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:30:46 GMT

I recently had the chance to chat with a few customers, and they shared how Toast IQ has become a game-changer for them. Many mentioned using it like a personal assistant, helping them make sense of reports, uncover sales insights, and even plan menu updates around local events.Here’s one story that really stood out from one of our community members!

“This tool is so much more helpful than running reports and feeding them into another AI program. For example, I wanted to see sales numbers comparing Oct 24/25. I realize those numbers are easily accessible in reports, but then I told it we opened an extra day in April 2025 — what was that impact? It responded easily with numbers, percentages, and divided it into categories driving higher sales. We added DoorDash in 2025 — what was that impact? Again, it easily provided numbers and percentages.” — @tinathom

If you’ve got your own stories about how Toast IQ has helped your restaurant, or ideas for how it could be even better, we’d love to hear them in the comments below!
Also, feel free to share any prompts you’ve been using that have helped you get great results; others in the community might find them useful, too!

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

HearthpizzeriaB — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:50:48 GMT

I have been dipping my toe in the waters of the Toast IQ portion of the software. I have been enjoying the ability to take a look at what major events and weather trends are playing a role in sales that I am seeing in the restaurant. Im looking forward to the insights others have in regards to how they are using what seems to be a really powerful addition to Toast!

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

ashokr — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 03:30:54 GMT

Hello Friends,

First, happy Thanksgiving! The season of giving and spreading kindness!!!

Thanks, Rob, for initiating the dialogue, a great way to get engagement and ideas bounced from the user community!

ToastIQ is an excellent addition to the Toast ecosystem. I actually built something very similar about six months ago because my wife didn’t like having to open the ToastNow app and manually change dates and filters just to see daily sales or slightly more detailed views. Now that ToastIQ is live and functional, I’m excited to retire my homegrown solution (screenshot below) soon. The ability to interact with our data using simple, natural language is genuinely invaluable.

That said, I do have a few suggestions that I believe would make ToastIQ even more powerful and user-friendly:

Session history retention
When I navigate from ToastNow to ToastIQ via the bottom prompt, then go back to ToastNow and return to ToastIQ, my previous query and results are cleared. It would be great if the query history and results were retained at least within the same session, as ChatGPT does with conversational context.
Command/query history
A visible command history would be very helpful. Being able to quickly rerun or edit previous queries instead of retyping them from scratch would make day-to-day use much smoother. (See my sample below)
Preconfigured and adaptive queries
I’d love to see some preconfigured “quick queries” at the bottom of the interface, ideally adapting over time to my most commonly used questions. This kind of self-learning shortcut bar would make repeated interactions much faster. (See below in the example screenshot)
API access
An API interface for ToastIQ would be fantastic. I want to be able to send queries and retrieve results programmatically (e.g., from a command-line tool or scripts) so I can integrate ToastIQ insights into my own workflows.
Reward redemption details
Reward redemption queries don’t yet give exactly what I need. For example, when I ask:
“Give me the total number of orders, total reward dollars redeemed, and the total sales from those orders.”
ToastIQ returns the total orders and total sales generated, but not the total reward dollars redeemed. Having all three metrics in one response would be very useful.
Top customers by reward balance
I’d like to query something like: “Show me the top 5 customers with the highest reward balances.” This currently appears to be unsupported, but would be a valuable feature for targeted outreach and loyalty management.
Reward card balance queries
Similarly, the ability to query and report on reward card balances would add significant practical value.
I want to do more with AI: open bug reports, provide feedback on ToastIQ interactions that didn't work, and list all 3rd-party takeout order details.

Ideally, we shouldn't need to go to the orders hub and make ToastIQ my main interaction. The ToastNow app would serve as a secondary interface, and most usage would migrate to the natural-language query versions.

Overall, ToastIQ is already a strong step forward, and with a few enhancements like these, it could become an indispensable daily tool for operators like me.

my 2c 🙂

Please play with it and give feedback to make it even better! You'll love it.

Cheers, Ashok

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

HearthpizzeriaB — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:19:48 GMT

@ashokr how have you noticed the accuracy of the data on some of the requests? I had some prompts I used to ask about how many of certain items were sold in a time period, and they seemed off. When I double checked them with the product mix, I saw a large discrepancy with the data I got off of the AI versus checking the product mix.

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

ashokr — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 22:28:51 GMT

You are correct, I have noticed that discrepency too. It seems to match sometimes, but also be wildly off next time. I would suggest you take a screen shot of the correct and wrong result so developers can know to track this down. Data is key 🙂.. but I should have captured.. was in a rush when I noticed and didn't get to it after.

But to their credit they did say "Answers provided by AI can be wrong" 🙂

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

KellyLynn01 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:19:40 GMT

Hello, everyone!

Like you all, I've been using Toast IQ for a couple of weeks now and I wanted to share a little bit about my experience. First of all, Toast IQ has definitely become a huge part of familiarizing myself with AI in general: how to prompt AI, how to more finely-tune requests, and just getting to know how to leverage the power of this tool to benefit my business.

One of the first things I noticed is that Toast IQ is NOT equal to general AI like Chat GPT or Google Gemini. Toast IQ directly tailors your prompts to you business by using your actual restaurant data including sales and operations and combines that with external factors like local events and weather to turn this data into answers to questions any restaurant owner might have like "how should I staff for the weekend?" or "what items should I prep more of today?".

As evidenced above by @HearthpizzeriaB and @ashokr, Toast IQ is brand new this year and I've found a few discrepancies with these answers, however, the potential is here for a HUGE gamer changer with this program for all Toast users once the program and AI itself becomes more developed.

One of the most helpful tips I've received from Toast IQ after prompting it to compare sales numbers across days and staff is that I have a few standout employees who consistently see higher volumes of guests, have larger tickets, and upsell more than other staff. Toast IQ was able to identify this and give me the tip that other servers could possibly shadow these employees or even just chat with them about their personal strategies, likely ending in higher sales numbers, higher tips across the board, and even all-around employee empowerment. This was fascinating to learn and see the raw data alongside these tips, showing me that Toast IQ goes beyond the superficial "how busy will I be today" and has the potential to really help users dive deeper into their operations and understand more than we thought possible - all with a few clicks!

If anyone else has any favorite prompts for Toast IQ that surprised them, let me know here! I love to share ideas and I'm always looking for new insights help make improvements to my small business!

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

ashokr — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:14:38 GMT

I did something the other day which I was so thankful to ToastIQ. I never thought this would work, but tried it to check if it works.

We ran out of lamb, and we have couple of dishes that i want to mark Out of Stock. So i said find all lamb items, then said mark them as out of stock. It made it easy that I didn't have to go item by item and mark them individually. I was hesitant but surprised it worked. Now this has gone past my personal ChatBot 🙂

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

Sdaniel — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:00:54 GMT

Hi everyone!

I recently received access to Toast IQ, and while I don’t yet have much experience using it, it has already been helpful, particularly with menu building and cleanup. For example, we have multiple modifier groups, and I had previously been unable to find a report that clearly showed which pre-modifier groups were tied to which modifier groups. Using Toast IQ, I entered a pre-modifier group number and asked it to identify any modifier groups that referenced it. This revealed that we had several pre-modifier groups that were not assigned to any modifier groups, allowing me to confidently archive those unused pre-modifier groups. While there is a menu cleanup tool available, it takes a long time to load and only shows modifier groups that include a pre-modifier group, rather than identifying the exact relationships. Because of this, Toast IQ proved to be a much more efficient option. I’m excited to continue utilizing Toast IQ as I become more familiar with it.

One piece of feedback I have is related to MLM functionality. For example, when I asked a question related to comps and wanted to gather data for a specific comp code across all locations, Toast IQ only pulled data for the location I was currently logged into. To retrieve data for all locations, I would need to switch locations individually, which would require doing this for 26 locations. Having an option to pull MLM data across all locations at once would be extremely helpful.

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

ashokr — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:40:45 GMT

To be honest, I'm now using ToastIQ more than ever before. Its capabilities are silently growing, which is awesome.

I have 2 requests to the dev team:

- Ability to use the arrow key to go to the previous question. A lot og times i just make a slight change, this would help not to type the whole thing.

- Ability to send feedback to the ToastIQ team directly from ToastIQ. Just like in Tesla, we could record a message saying "BugReport" and then say anything goes to the team.

@Rob @jenni ???

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

Rob — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 22:36:47 GMT

Thanks for this feedback, happy to hear that it's becoming a better tool for you! I will relay this feedback and let you know if there are any updates!

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

Rob — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:34:23 GMT

We reached out with this feedback, and this was the response I received:
"Folks can give feedback directly on replies by using the smiley faces and writing comments there - we do very much look at them!!"

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

rcmck — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:52:52 GMT

Definitely find myself using it more and more, like the data to answer your question about gift cards, that would have taken me several report runs and calculations, it really is pretty awesome.

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

TerryBuster — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:14:18 GMT

Using it more and more every day. Best thing I've seen, is the lift off managers while they are on the floor. The ability to put in counts, 86 and 68, and set special prices while on the move is wonderful.

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

TerryBuster — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:28:45 GMT

Ability to send feedback to the team is vital, and difficult at best to do.

Re: How Are You Using Toast IQ?

Rob — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:20:29 GMT

Thanks for this feedback, I have been hearing this one a lot and have let the product team know about it!