Recipes

Menu: Recipes · Who: owner, branch manager · Restaurants only

A recipe says what a dish is made of. Selling the dish then takes its ingredients off the shelf — not the dish itself — and tells you what it really costs to make.

The top of the page

Three figures across the top: Costed dishes, Average food cost and Worst food cost. The worst one is the number to look at: it is the dish quietly losing you money.

A recipe makes one thing

Every recipe produces either:

• a Dish — something the POS sells (a variant: "Chicken Fajita — Large 12″"), or
• a Prep item — something the kitchen makes in batches and then uses: dough, sauce, marinade.

Never both. Pick one at the top of the form.

Ingredients

Enter quantities in kitchen units — grams and millilitres — even if you buy in kilos. The conversion to the stocking unit happens for you.

Wastage % is trim, peel and spillage. 5% on chicken means both the cost and the shelf are charged 1.05 × what the recipe says. Use it; it is usually the difference between the food cost you think you have and the one you actually have.

Prep items explode

If an ingredient is itself made by a recipe, it is not deducted as itself — it explodes through its own recipe, scaled by its yield, until only raw material is left:

450 g dough ÷ a 10 kg batch × (7 kg flour × 1.02 wastage) = 0.3213 kg of flour

So one large fajita takes flour, oil, cheese, sauce, chicken and a box off the shelf, and the ledger shows each one. A recipe that reaches itself is stopped rather than looping.

A prep item you would rather count

Exploding is right for a mixture nobody counts. When you DO want to count it — because it is made somewhere else, or because you check how many tubs are left — tick Made in batches on the item. It then stops exploding: it is deducted as itself, and it arrives by a Production or a transfer instead of by magic.

What it costs

Cost is theoretical: every exploded ingredient at that branch's own weighted average cost. An ingredient that has never been purchased is flagged rather than costed at zero, so a half-priced dish can never look profitable by accident.

Two things follow automatically:

• A dish with a recipe ignores its own stock item — a pizza is made, not bought.
• The PCA report ranks every dish by food cost % and contribution.

Rules the system enforces

• One recipe per dish, one per prep item.
• The same ingredient cannot be listed twice in one recipe.
• A unit that cannot convert is refused where you write it, not later when costing — if an item is stocked in litres you cannot write its line in grams.
• A broken recipe still opens so you can fix it; only the stock deduction stays strict.