Your data flows one direction — into Sculpture

AF Studio sits between the systems you already use. On one side are the places your numbers live — your point-of-sale and your vendor invoices. On the other is Sculpture Hospitality, your back office. AF Studio does the work in between: it signs in, pulls exactly what it needs, reformats it to what Sculpture expects, and imports it — on demand or on a schedule, with nothing for you to install.

Where it comes from	What AF Studio pulls	Where it lands
Toast — POS	Product Mix & Modifier Details	Sculpture
SpotOn — POS	Sales & product data	Sculpture
Fintech — invoices	Invoices, per location & period	Sculpture
Vendor PDFs	Line items read from each PDF	Sculpture

The rest of this guide opens each of those up — the shared foundation they all sit on, what happens for each system, how it runs safely from your own network, where your data goes, and why the result is the same every single time. It is written for the people who run the business, not the people who write software: what it does for you, not how it is built.

One promise underneath all of it: the same inputs always produce the same result. AF Studio follows the exact steps a trained person would — precisely, repeatably, and on schedule — so you can trust the numbers without re-checking them by hand.

Read this if…

You run on Toast or SpotOn, take invoices through Fintech or as vendor PDFs, and keep your inventory and costs in Sculpture Hospitality.
Someone on your team spends hours each week exporting reports, cleaning spreadsheets, and re-keying invoices into Sculpture — one location at a time.
You want that work to happen on its own, the same way every time, without handing your passwords to anyone or installing software you have to maintain.

The manual way — what AF Studio replaces

Today, getting this data out of each system and into Sculpture is a hands-on chore — and it repeats for every location, every period. Here is what a person does by hand, and what AF Studio does instead.

System	By hand today	With AF Studio
Toast — POS	Log in, open the Product Mix / sales report, set the location and dates, export a file, clean the columns to match Sculpture, then log in to Sculpture and import it.	One click — or a schedule — pulls it, reformats it, and imports it.
SpotOn — POS	The same routine inside SpotOn’s reporting: find the sales / product report, export it, reshape it, and import it into Sculpture.	The same single flow — no reshaping by hand.
Fintech — invoices	Log into the Fintech portal, locate each location’s invoices for the period, download them, and enter them into Sculpture.	Retrieved and filed into Sculpture automatically.
Vendor PDFs	Open each PDF, read the line items, and key them into Sculpture one invoice at a time.	Read line-item by line-item and processed automatically — tagged to the right restaurant.

The “last mile” a person still finishes today

Some systems even offer a built-in export — SpotOn, for example, has a native report designed for Sculpture. But those exports stop at producing a file. Getting that file matched to the right restaurant, formatted the way Sculpture’s importer expects, and actually posted is still a manual job. That last mile — the part that eats the hours — is precisely what AF Studio finishes, unattended.

The tell-tale sign: the manual way grows with your headcount — more locations means more hours of the same clicking and re-keying, and mistakes creep in as people rush. AF Studio grows with a configuration change instead, so the effort stays flat as you add restaurants and the result never varies with who happened to run it.

The foundation every workflow shares

Before the individual tools, it helps to see what they have in common. Every workflow in AF Studio sits on the same foundation, which is why they all behave the same way — learn one and you already know the rest.

Foundation	What it means for you
Sign in once	You reach everything from one secure web address — no VPN, no app to install, nothing to keep updated on your side. Any modern browser works.
Load once, use everywhere	Your list of locations — and each location’s reporting periods — is read once when you arrive, then reused by every tool. That is why every dropdown is ready the instant a tool opens. An Update client list link re-checks your live account whenever you want.
Real periods, per location	The period list shows each location’s own five most-recent real reporting periods, newest first, read straight from the back office — not generic guesses, and never stale.
Preview before you commit	Every tool can Preview — show you exactly what would import — and stop there. Nothing changes until you say so.
One scheduler for everything	The same Schedule control runs any tool Daily, Weekly (tick the days), or every few hours, at a time you set. Set it once; it runs unattended.
A record of every run	Each run is logged with its result, so there is always an answer to “did it run, and what did it do?”

The home page

After you sign in you land on a single home page with a tile for each workflow you run — today Fintech Invoices, PDF Invoices, Product Mix, and Modifier Details. Each tile opens a familiar screen with the same location and period controls. A Back to Home button returns you there; the browser’s own Back button is intentionally disabled, so you never land on a half-loaded screen. (Edgebrook staff who support several accounts first pick which client to work in, and can switch between them without signing out — you only ever see your own.)

Why “preview first” matters The automation people worry about is automation that acts without a check. AF Studio inverts that: the default is to look before you commit. You can see the pending invoices, the staged line items, or the exact file that would be imported — and only then decide to import it, or let a schedule do it for you once you trust it.

Toast — your sales, pulled for you

If you run Toast, AF Studio retrieves your Product Mix and Modifier Details for a location and period and imports them into Sculpture — one location or a whole batch at once, with no manual exports and no re-keying. Product Mix keeps what sold current; Modifier Details keeps the recipe- and portion-level breakdown current, so your costing reflects how items are actually built.

How a run goes

Choose one location or several — there is a Select-all — and a period. Your picks are remembered, so the next run starts where you left off.
AF Studio signs in to Toast and downloads the report, then reformats it to exactly what Sculpture expects — names and codes matched to your restaurant so nothing lands in the wrong place.
Preview (no commit) builds the file and lets you check it; Retrieve & Import does the same and posts it into Sculpture for real.
Every run also saves the produced file to a folder you choose, so you always keep a copy of the data. (Both run buttons stay disabled until a destination folder is picked — the data always has somewhere to land.)
Pick several locations and it runs a batch — one clean pass per location, each for the same period.

Fine control when you need it A single-location run can redirect the import into a different back-office location when your Sculpture setup calls for it; a batch imports each location into itself. And restaurant-name matching is forgiving of small punctuation differences — a straight versus curly apostrophe, for example — so a name never silently fails to line up.

AF Connect — running Toast from your own network

Toast ties access to the internet connection at your location, so a request coming from a data center looks wrong to it. AF Connect is the small, secure piece that solves this: it lets the cloud run the Toast step through your own connection, exactly as if your staff pulled the report on-site.

What it is — and isn’t

AF Connect is…	AF Connect is not…
A tiny, secure forwarder you run on one Windows PC at your location (about a five-minute, one-time setup).	Not automation — it holds none of the workflow logic.
Outbound-only — it reaches out to the service, so it works behind any normal router with no firewall or port changes.	Not storage — it keeps none of your data.
A relay for encrypted, opaque traffic it cannot read — it simply passes it along.	Not a window into your network — it exposes nothing else on that PC.

How it runs day to day

It starts on its own every time the PC boots, runs quietly in the background, and reconnects automatically after an internet blip.
The portal shows a green “AF Connect agent online” indicator; the Toast run buttons enable once it is online, so you always know it is ready.
For scheduled or overnight runs the PC just needs to stay powered on — the screen can sleep.

The result Hands-off cloud automation for Toast, without moving your point-of-sale access anywhere. Toast sees a normal, authorized session on your own connection; you get the convenience of the cloud without giving up the network Toast expects.

SpotOn — another POS, the same flow

Running SpotOn instead of — or alongside — Toast? AF Studio pulls your SpotOn sales and product data and brings it into Sculpture the very same way.

Same location + period selection, the same Preview-then-import safety, and the same one-click scheduler.
Each location’s data is scoped to that location — nothing is ever mixed between restaurants.
SpotOn offers a native export designed for Sculpture, but it stops at producing a file. AF Studio finishes the last mile — matching it to the right restaurant and posting it — unattended.
A mixed estate is fine: some locations on Toast and some on SpotOn each pull from their own POS into the same Sculpture back office, on the same schedule.

The point: adding or switching a POS does not change how you work. The screens, the safety, and the scheduling stay identical — only the system it reads from is different. Learn the flow once and it applies to whichever point-of-sale a location runs.

Fintech — invoices, retrieved & filed

AF Studio retrieves your Fintech invoices for each location and period and imports them straight into Sculpture, so your costs stay current without anyone downloading a thing.

Pick the location — the list is filtered to locations that actually have Fintech invoices this period (for example, “showing 3 of 17 locations”), so you never land on an empty result.
Pick the period from that location’s real, most-recent periods.
Preview (no commit) opens the Fintech screen, shows the pending invoices that would import, and stops — finishing with a screenshot and a plain “nothing was imported” message so you can see exactly what it found.
Retrieve Fintech Invoices does everything Preview does, then imports them into Sculpture for real.
Set a schedule and it repeats on its own, always targeting the current period as the weeks roll forward.

Recurring runs stay on the right period A schedule follows the period’s position (“most recent”), not a fixed calendar week — so a nightly job keeps working the correct period week after week, with no maintenance from you.

Vendor PDFs — read automatically

For invoices that arrive as PDFs, hand them to AF Studio: it reads the line items and processes them into Sculpture — each invoice tagged to the right restaurant, with a safe preview first.

Pick the location the invoices belong to first — that tags every file you add to that restaurant, so nothing is ever mixed up.
Drop in one file, several, or a whole folder. Non-PDFs are ignored, large batches upload in the background, and waiting invoices are grouped by restaurant in an inbox.
Preview reads the PDFs, builds the line-item file, and stages it on the Sculpture screen so you can check it — nothing is posted.
Process now imports them for real and clears them from the inbox once done.
The extracted file is saved back alongside your PDFs, so you always keep the data — even on a no-commit preview.

Reads what a scanner mangles — and checks its own work Vendor PDFs are often faded, photographed, or low-quality scans that ordinary text tools garble. AF Studio reads them the way a person would, and it cross-checks the totals — so a mis-read price is caught and corrected rather than silently entered wrong. This is the one place a small amount of AI is used, for exactly the task that needs it: reading a document. (More on where AI is and isn’t used further down.)

The PDF tool adds one extra choice the Fintech tool does not need: when you schedule it, you pick a run type — a safe Preview or a full Import — so an unattended job can either stage invoices for your review or post them outright, whichever you prefer.

Two invoice sources, one destination Whether an invoice comes through Fintech or as a vendor PDF, it ends up in the same place — Sculpture — the same way. You choose the source that fits each vendor; AF Studio handles both.

Sculpture Hospitality — always up to date

Sculpture is the destination. Everything above flows into it, so your inventory counts and costs reflect what actually happened — without anyone touching a spreadsheet.

What stays current in Sculpture	Fed by
Sales / product mix	Toast · SpotOn
Item-level modifier & recipe detail	Toast
Invoice costs	Fintech · vendor PDFs

The connections are maintained for you As the underlying systems change over time, all updates to the existing application models (Sculpture, Toast, and the rest) and to your existing automated workflows are handled by Edgebrook — so the pipeline keeps working without you managing anything.

If you also run Sculpture Food — a separate Sculpture product, on its own address and billed separately — it is fed the same way, except that it is driven by invoices rather than a point-of-sale. It is added as its own target alongside your beverage back office, so each system stays cleanly separate while sharing the same familiar screens.

Choosing which restaurants — one shared list

You decide which locations AF Studio works with, from a secure link, up to your plan’s limit. One list covers every tool — Product Mix, Modifier Details, PDF Invoices, and Fintech — so there is no separate limit to track per workflow.

The list is built from your Sculpture account (that is why your logins come first), with a running counter, e.g. “12 of 20 selected,” and a Select all. If you go over your plan, the page tells you exactly how many to remove.
Only currently active restaurants appear — anything with no activity in roughly six months is held out as inactive, so you never spend a plan slot on a closed or dormant location.
Locations are grouped by area, with a Shared section for any seen by more than one account, listed once so they are never double-counted against your limit.
A small colored-star legend shows at a glance what each location has — which invoices come through Fintech versus as PDFs, and which run on Toast — so the picture matches how each restaurant actually operates.

What it powers — the reports you rely on

All of this feeds Sculpture for one reason: the reports that control your costs. Those reports are only as good as the data behind them — and AF Studio’s whole job is to keep that data complete, correct, and current, on its own.

Report	What it tells you	Fed by
Variance — theoretical vs. actual usage	What should have been used based on what you sold, versus what actually left the shelf — your shrinkage and loss.	POS sales + counts
Cost of goods / pour cost %	Your true cost of sales — what each pour or plate actually costs you.	Invoices + sales
Product / sales mix	What is selling, in what quantities, and what it is costing you.	Toast · SpotOn Product Mix
Purchasing & inventory value	What you paid your vendors and what you are holding on hand.	Fintech · PDF invoices
Ordering / par levels	What to reorder to hit par, based on real usage.	Usage + counts

Garbage in, garbage out. A variance or pour-cost report is only trustworthy if every sale and every invoice actually made it in — on time, in the right format, for the right location. Keeping that true, automatically, is the quiet work AF Studio does for you.

Your data stays private — by design

To do this work, AF Studio needs to sign in to your systems on your behalf — so the most important question is what happens to your passwords. The short answer: no one at Edgebrook can see them.

You submit each application login (Sculpture, Toast) once, through a private, secure link. It is encrypted the moment you submit it and used only by the automation, only at run time.
There is no screen, anywhere, that shows a stored password to staff — that ability was deliberately left out of the product. The automation can use a login without any person being able to read it.
After sign-in, the system works from a temporary pass that expires — like a hotel key card — rather than holding onto your password.
Documents and results live in encrypted, access-controlled storage, kept separate for each account, and every run keeps a full history.

Two passwords — don’t mix them up Your application passwords (Toast, Sculpture) are yours and stay private — we never see them. Your AF Studio Portal password is separate: you receive a temporary one and change it the first time you sign in. It only opens the portal; it is never one of your system logins.

Deterministic by design — not an AI that guesses

This is the part worth looking at closely. AF Studio is not a chatbot or an AI “agent” that tries to figure things out and hopes it got them right. It performs a fixed, known sequence — the same steps a trained person would — every single time.

What that gives you	In plain terms
Repeatable	The same inputs always produce the same result. There is no “creative” variation between runs.
Auditable	Every run is logged with what it did and how it ended, so there is always a clear record.
Reliable	It shows up on schedule and runs unattended — whether or not anyone is watching.
Safe	Preview-before-commit means you see what would happen before anything is posted.
Scales by configuration	Adding locations is a setup change, not another hire — the same process just covers more restaurants.

Where AI is — and isn’t — used

AI is used narrowly, in the one place that genuinely calls for interpretation: reading a scanned or photographed distributor invoice. Even then it is a single, bounded request with its totals cross-checked — not a loose “agent” wandering your systems. The navigation, extraction, and import steps are defined, repeatable work; the AI never decides what to click or where your data goes.

It watches itself, and asks for help rather than guessing The platform checks its own screens as it works. Small changes on a target system it can adjust to automatically; anything larger it flags for a person instead of pressing ahead and risking a wrong import. Guessing is never the fallback.

Why this matters for a back office: your inventory and cost numbers feed real decisions. “Usually right” isn’t good enough — you need the same, correct result every time, which is exactly what a deterministic process delivers. The architecture behind that choice, and what it means for your monthly cost, is the subject of a companion white paper, Deterministic Automation and the Economics of Predictable Pricing.

Another system? It fits your workflow

Have another POS, a vendor portal, or a report you still pull by hand? AF Studio is built to add integrations that match how your business already runs — the same pull → reformat → import pattern, on a schedule you set, feeding the same clean back office.

New workflows, scheduling, data mining, or connections to other systems are scoped and quoted by a formal proposal before any work begins — agreed cost, hours, and materials up front — so nothing outside what you approved is ever billed by surprise.

Where this is heading A single, secure home page with a tile for every workflow you run — each opening a familiar screen, each able to run on demand or on a schedule, all feeding one clean, current back office. You add restaurants and systems; the way you work stays the same.

Edgebrook Software, LLC — AF Studio. Toast, SpotOn, Fintech, and Sculpture Hospitality are third-party products of their respective owners; AF Studio automates the work of moving your data between them. Illustrative figures (such as “showing 3 of 17”) are examples only. Screens and details may differ slightly as the product evolves.