Fourth API
Fourth is an AI-powered workforce and inventory management platform that unites scheduling, payroll, HR, purchasing, and recipe engineering for restaurants and hospitality operators. An unofficial API lets you programmatically pull schedules, timecards, employees, recipes, inventory, vendors, and purchase data—and push updates like shifts, time entries, and account provisioning back into Fourth and HotSchedules.
What is Fourth?
Fourth is an AI-powered workforce and inventory management platform that unites recruiting, payroll, labor, scheduling, and inventory operations for restaurants and hospitality operators. Customers use Fourth—including the HotSchedules workforce platform—to build employee schedules, track time and attendance, run payroll and tip management, manage purchasing and receiving, engineer recipes and menus, and forecast demand across mid-market and enterprise locations.
Core product areas include:
- HotSchedules (workforce management, scheduling, and task management)
- Human Capital Management (talent acquisition, HR, payroll, and PEO services)
- Inventory Management (purchasing, receiving, invoicing, recipe and menu engineering, production control)
- Fourth iQ (AI demand forecasting and analytics)
- Adaco, MacromatiX, and Red Book Solutions (specialized hospitality inventory and operations)
Common data entities:
- Shifts, Schedules, Roles, Locations, Departments
- Employees, Timecards, Time & Attendance, Pay Rates, Tips
- User Accounts and Identity (SCIM provisioning)
- Recipes, Menu Items, Sales Items, Production Plans (RME)
- Products, Vendors, Purchase Orders, Invoices, Requisitions, Inventory Counts
- Forecasts, Labor Productivity, Budgets
The Fourth Integration Challenge
Restaurant and hospitality operators run scheduling, labor, and inventory on Fourth daily, but turning its portal- and partner-gated workflows into reliable API automation is non-trivial:
- Partner-gated API access: API credentials and accounts must be requested through a Fourth representative or Professional Services contact, and access varies by product and customer agreement
- Fragmented API surface: Schedules, Timecards, SCIM, RME, and Adaco each expose their own endpoints, object models, and versioning—there is no single unified API
- HotSchedules vs. Fourth platform split: Workforce data lives across HotSchedules and the broader Fourth platform, with different authentication and account models per surface
- Time-zone and shift-boundary handling: Schedule data is returned in UTC and shifts belong to the day on which they end, so overnight shifts require careful date-range stitching
- Mixed API generations: SOAP web services, REST/JSON endpoints, and import/export batch APIs coexist depending on module and version
- Limited data scope per API: Several APIs (e.g., SCIM) expose only a constrained range of fields, so combining sources is often required for a full operational picture
How Supergood Creates Fourth APIs
Supergood reverse-engineers authenticated browser flows and Fourth's published REST APIs—across HotSchedules, Workforce Management, RME, and Adaco—to deliver a resilient, normalized API layer for your Fourth tenant without waiting on per-partner gating.
- Handles Basic Authentication and account-based credentials securely across HotSchedules and Fourth platform surfaces
- Maintains session continuity with automated refresh and change detection
- Normalizes UTC shift boundaries, time-zone offsets, and day-of-shift logic so schedules and timecards line up consistently
- Unifies Schedules, Timecards, SCIM, RME, and inventory objects into a single consistent API so you integrate once
Use Fourth with AI agents: Fourth MCP Server →
Getting Started
- Schedule Integration Assessment
Book a 30-minute session to confirm your Fourth modules, HotSchedules accounts, and authentication model.
- Supergood Generates and Validates Your API
We deliver a production-ready Fourth adapter tailored to your scheduling, labor, and inventory surfaces.
- Deploy with Monitoring
Go live with continuous monitoring and automatic adjustments as Fourth and HotSchedules evolve.
API Endpoints
Authentication
/authenticateAuthenticate to a Fourth or HotSchedules account using Basic Authentication and obtain a session for downstream calls.
Workforce
/schedulesRetrieve published shift schedules with start/end times, breaks, roles, locations, and departments across a date range (UTC).
Workforce
/timecardsPull time and attendance records including clock-in/out, breaks, hours, and pay periods from the Timecards API.
Workforce
/employeesList employees and account data with role, location, and pay-rate context from the Workforce Management and SCIM surfaces.
Identity
/create_accountProvision a user account in a partner system from Fourth employees using the SCIM API.
Inventory
/recipesExport recipes, menu items, and sales items from the Recipe & Menu Engineering (RME) APIs for costing and analytics.
Inventory
/inventoryRetrieve products, vendors, inventory counts, and requisitions from Adaco and Inventory Management surfaces.
Use Cases
Sync schedules and labor data into your warehouse
- Pull published shifts, roles, and locations from HotSchedules into a single warehouse - Stream timecard and attendance events to downstream payroll and analytics tools - Normalize UTC shift boundaries and overnight shifts so labor reporting stays accurate
Automate employee provisioning and identity
- Create and update user accounts in partner systems from Fourth employees via SCIM - Keep role, location, and department assignments in sync across HR systems - Trigger onboarding and offboarding workflows when employee records change
Reconcile inventory, purchasing, and recipes
- Export recipes, sales items, and menu data from RME for costing and margin analysis - Sync products, vendors, purchase orders, and requisitions from Adaco into ERP and AP systems - Match inventory counts against production plans to surface waste and variance
Feed demand forecasts and labor productivity
- Pull Fourth iQ forecasts and labor productivity metrics into BI dashboards - Combine schedule, sales, and forecast data for above-store benchmarking - Drive automated scheduling recommendations from normalized demand signals
Technical Specifications
Authentication
Basic Authentication and account-based credentials across HotSchedules and Fourth platform surfaces, handled in a managed session
Connectivity
Fourth's published HTTP REST APIs (Schedules, Timecards, SCIM, RME, Adaco) plus authenticated browser flows where endpoints are gated
Response format
Normalized JSON across schedule, timecard, employee, recipe, and inventory objects
Rate limits
Adaptive throttling tuned to your Fourth tenant to avoid partner-side API limits
Session management
Automatic session refresh, credential rotation, and per-surface account handling
Data freshness
Near real-time pulls for schedules and timecards with optional scheduled batch syncs for inventory and RME
Security
Encrypted credential vault, scoped access tokens, SOC 2-aligned controls, and audit logging
Webhooks
Event-style callbacks for schedule publishes, timecard changes, and inventory updates
Latency
Sub-second reads on cached entities; multi-second responses when stitching multi-day UTC schedule ranges
Throughput
Horizontally scaled workers sized to multi-location restaurant and hospitality volume
Reliability
Retry, backoff, and idempotency keys for timecard, requisition, and provisioning writes
Adaptation
Continuous monitoring of Fourth and HotSchedules API releases, version changes, and configuration drift
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Supergood normalizes data across HotSchedules workforce surfaces and the Fourth platform—including Workforce Management, RME, and Adaco—so schedules, timecards, employees, and inventory sit behind a single consistent API.
Supergood works with your existing Fourth and HotSchedules credentials and authenticated sessions. We do not require you to wait on per-partner API gating, though we honor whatever access your account already grants.
Fourth returns schedule data in UTC and assigns each shift to the day it ends. Supergood normalizes time-zone offsets and stitches multi-day ranges so overnight and cross-midnight shifts report correctly.
Yes. Using the SCIM surface, Supergood can read employee records and create or update user accounts in your downstream systems, keeping role, location, and department data in sync.
Yes. Recipes and sales items from RME, plus products, vendors, requisitions, and inventory counts from Adaco and Inventory Management, are exposed through the same normalized API surface.