Recipes

A recipe lists the ingredients a product uses and how much of each. Once a dish has a recipe, the system knows what it consumes — which feeds both its cost and its stock.

Open Recipes

From the sidebar, open Inventory → Recipes. Every product you sell is listed, one row each.

Read the list

Each row tells you where that dish stands:

• Recipe — either No recipe, or how many ingredients it has.
• Recipe cost — what the ingredients cost, worked out from the quantities in the recipe and each ingredient's unit cost. It reads part costed when one of the ingredients has no cost yet, which means the figure is lower than the truth until you add it.
• Allergens — what the dish contains, rolled up from its ingredients.

Find the dishes with no recipe

The chips above the list are the fastest way to work through the job:

• No recipe — the products still to do. The number beside it is how many are left.
• Has recipe — the ones already done.
• All — everything.

Pick No recipe, work down the list, and the count drops as you go.

Build a recipe

1. 1

   Pick a product

   Click its row to open the recipe editor.

2. 2

   Add ingredients

   Add each ingredient the dish uses. If an ingredient doesn't exist yet, create it first under Ingredients.

3. 3

   Set the quantity

   Enter how much of each ingredient the dish uses, in that ingredient's unit. The Cost beside it updates as you type.

4. 4

   Save

   Save from the button at the top of the page.

See what the dish costs, and what you make on it

Each ingredient line shows a Cost — what that amount of that ingredient costs you at today's prices. Change a quantity and the cost changes with it, before you save anything.

Under Money on the right, those line costs add up:

• What it costs to make — the total for one of this dish.
• Margin incl. VAT — the price in the price box, VAT included, minus that cost, in pounds and as a percentage. A menu that sets its own price, or a size price, makes a different margin. The line under a price in the menu builder uses that menu's price and takes the VAT off first, so it says ex VAT.

A line shows a dash instead of a number when that ingredient has no cost yet. When that happens the page says so in words — "1 ingredient has no cost yet, so this is lower than what the dish really costs" — because a total that is quietly short is worse than no total at all. Add the cost on the ingredient and the dash fills in.

These are today's prices. The number moves on its own when a delivery costs more than the last one.

Set the menu price

The Menu price sits in the same Money panel, so you can price the dish right after seeing what it costs. Type a new price and the margin updates as you type — nothing is saved until you click Save price, so you can try a few figures and see what each one leaves you.

Saving changes the product's price everywhere it is sold — except on a menu that sets its own price for that product, which the page tells you about.

Sizes

The Sizes panel says what one sale actually takes. Most products have no sizes, and it says so: "This product has no size set, so one sale takes one recipe."

If the dish is sold in sizes, it names them, says which one the amounts above are for, and what the others take — a half takes 0.5× the recipe of a pint. A product only counts as sized once its category has a size set and the sizes have prices; until then it behaves as a single size.

Change several at once

• Bulk import at the top of the page downloads a spreadsheet of every product, takes it back filled in, and shows you what it matched before saving. Use it to set recipes up from scratch.
• Tick the boxes beside the rows to act on several products at once. With rows ticked, Clear recipe removes every ingredient line from those products. It asks first, and it cannot be undone.

Allergens roll up automatically

As you add and remove ingredients, the dish's allergen summary updates on the recipe page — no save and reload needed. It is built from the allergens you set on each ingredient. You can also set product-level allergen overrides here if a dish needs them.

Prepped ingredients in recipes

A prepped ingredient (coleslaw, mash, a curry base) appears in the ingredient picker marked prepped — add one line of it instead of its raw components. Its cost and allergens carry through from its batch recipe, so the dish's margin and allergen summary stay right, and the allergen preview updates as soon as you add the line. The unit choices for a prepped line stick to the same kind of measure as the ingredient itself (a kg-measured mash is used in kg or g).

What a recipe drives

A recipe ties a dish to its ingredients. This lets the system cost the dish (see Margin) and, for stock-tracked items, draw down ingredient stock as the dish sells (see Stock levels).

What's next

• Serving sizes — tell us what a double or a pint pours, so sized drinks count the right amount.
• Stock levels — set and track your counts.
• Margin — see your dish margins.