Recipe Worksheet School Name Educator Name Menu Item Number of Portions Portion Size Cooking Method Recipe Source Ingredients Item Amount Procedure. Recipe Costing is SO important but also extremely difficult to maintain. Orderly was developed for chefs, by chefs, to be the easiest and most reliable food costing tool on the market. The less time you spend in our software the more time you have to do what you truly love! Simply build your recipes in Orderly once.
- App & Technology, Operational Efficiency, Technology, Uncategorized
An easy way to ensure you are profitable is to align the cost of your recipes with your selling price.
At the end of the day running a restaurant is a numbers game. Plain and simple, but let’s be honest, not everyone is a numbers person.
I remember costing out recipes and menus in my old kitchen.
I would spend hours in the kitchen like a mad scientist in his lab, diving into math problems, the likes of which I haven’t seen since high school. I was converting ounces to quarts or asking myself “How many grams in a fluid cup?”
I was portioning, cutting, measuring and weighing the breakdown of every ingredient in my recipes, down to the grain of rice. “I would have the most comprehensive recipes ever!” I thought.
After HOURS of work, I was finally able to sit back in the glory of my achievement and look at my finalized menu.
That’s when I began to realize that the margins on some of my recipes weren’t where they once had been. With the rising prices of ingredients, some of my most popular menu items were LOSING me money. To top it all off, my distributors were sending substitutions for products I had never purchased before.
This meant that if one ingredient changed or there was a price increase, I would have to go back into my spreadsheets and constantly update product changes and prices. What a headache.
Now some restaurants are blessed to have full time staff members to manage the numbers.
But not me.
Aside from being a chef, I unwillingly also signed up to be the in-house plumber, fridge repairman, and personal therapist for the wait staff. On top of that I was also expected to be the numbers person.
The number of hats I was wearing aside from running the kitchen was growing, and all the moving parts involved in costing out my menu were completely out of my control. So unfortunately, like many chefs, recipe costing got put on the back burner.
The Problem
The problem with recipe costing is that there are so many variables constantly changing.
Ingredient prices are skyrocketing, vendors are substituting ingredients you typically buy due to product shortages, and on a busy Friday night you run out to the local store to pick up supplies.
The price you paid for ground beef pre-pandemic is nowhere close to what you are paying today, meaning your margins have shrunk immensely on your burger.
Unless you are inspecting every invoice that comes through your door with a magnifying glass and noting ingredient price trends, you have no idea what menu items are costing you today.
This is bad. Every day that you are unaware of your profit margins is a day that you could potentially be bleeding money!
The Solution
Hopefully by now you get the gist of this post. Recipe Costing is SO important but also extremely difficult to maintain.
Orderly was developed for chefs, by chefs, to be the easiest and most reliable food costing tool on the market. The less time you spend in our software the more time you have to do what you truly love!
Simply build your recipes in Orderly once. One time.
That’s it.
With every invoice that comes into the system, Orderly will automatically update the ingredient price showing you the true cost of the recipe today and the current margins based off your selling price!
This allows you to make many updates and revisions as a problem arises.
Buying a new ingredient or your vendor sent a substitution? No problem!
Orderly groups together substitute ingredients with the products you typically buy.
This means that regardless of whether you bought Hormel Apple Wood Smoked Bacon last week or Oscar Myer Apple Wood Smoked Bacon this week, Orderly will group these like items together and use them interchangeably in your recipes depending on which item you bought most recently, giving you the most up today price for every menu item you build in Orderly!
Recipe costing is something that NEEDS to be done to ensure you are running a profitable business.
FINALLY, a recipe costing solution resilient to substitutions and supplier changes.
Say goodbye to daily recipe maintenance!
Ready to put your recipe costing on autopilot and receive up-to-date food cost insights?
Reach out today and our team will be happy to discuss how Orderly can help!
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completely controls your food costing, recipe costing, menu costing and inventory control.
With CostGuard restaurant software and inventory management software:
you can manage any and all aspects of your restaurant business: actual food costs, ideal food costs, menu costing and engineering, counting, receiving, ordering, variance. CostGuard separates your bar costs from your food costs, suggests orders from par levels, tracks price creep, calculates overhead, and much more. Sell alcohol? CostGuard track your pours and your mixers.
CostGuard restaurant software, Recommended for Restaurant Foodservice, the Prime Suite, consisting of:
How the Prime Suite can Benefit your Restaurant:
Instant “pre-cost” information updated automatically based on your most current food costs. Standardize recipes using unlimited ingredients and/or sub-recipes. Stylized entry of your recipe method that can include multi-media.
SmartScaling™
converts recipes to larger and smaller yields and also converts units intelligently. See how it’s done
Overhead
You can’t accurately calculate your costs unless you include overhead. CostGuard calculates and adds it to your food costs.
Target
your inventory items by groups. This allows you to cost your food, beverages and supplies separately.
This can be done globally or by category (e.g.,entrees, appetizers, desserts, etc.)
CostGuard will track prices from Vendors for you, and later, you can use this information to create orders. CostGuard calls this process a Bid.
CostGuard considers a Bid a promise from a Vendor. When you enter a Bid, it can be used to fill in the pricing for Orders and Receipts. If you are pricing out a party, you can use the Bid feature to calculate your ingredient costs.
Simply counting your inventory puts workers on notice that someone is watching. That process alone can and will lower your food costs.
Count by broken cases, store items in multiple locations, print count sheets, and sort items by sub-locations to match your layout. Count as often as you want. Print extension reports instantly by locations, groups (e.g., domestic beer, premium vodka etc), cost centers, etc. You can also import count information from liquor control systems and other inventory control software.
When goods arrive, simply recall the matching purchase order (or enter the quantities manually). We’ll warn you if there’s a price creep, and let you know if the total dollars you’ve entered don’t match the total amount invoiced. Automatic page totals let you reconcile page by page instead of waiting till the end of the invoice. These controls alone can save you many hours and thousands of dollars.
You can also import receipts from suppliers using the Vendor Transport Interface.
The POS interface reads the sales mix directly into Sales Analysis, CostGuard combines this information with your actual inventory prices to give you correct food costing resulting in correct decisions.
A Requisition is a named list of Inventory items that you want to track or keep together. Requisitions are a handy way of grouping items for a particular cost center such as moving items from a production kitchen to a retail outlet. Use Requisitions for tracking Inventory items for catering and banquets, to track supplies to a related department such as sending sugar to a bar, to create generic pull lists for day-to-day operations, to create pull lists for daily prep sheets and production schedules based on the Recipes you selected. This feature will let you scale the recipes to match the number of customers, and then you can send the ingredients directly to a requisition.
Report by inventory levels, purchasing history, shrinkage/variance, Actual Usage, Ideal Usage, Variance (compares actual vs. ideal), Re-order, pricing Alerts.
Reports can be summarized by group (e.g., meat, seafood, bottled beer, etc.,) and by, major cost centers( e.g., food, bar, supplies etc.,), date range (day, week, YTD, custom, etc.), details (y/n), preview, etc. You can even choose to see some or all items.
Recipe And Menu Costing Software 2020
Options:
Recipe And Menu Costing Software Download
- Multi-Unit Controller Easily distribute new recipes and concepts to other units
How it’s being used:
“We are thoroughly loving Costguard and continue to be impressed by what we are able to do with it. It is much more efficient to only manage one database which contains all of our recipes, ingredients, costs, sell priced and nutritionals.”
Quita Bertelsen, Financial Analyst, Dunn Bros Coffee Franchising.
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I have been using CostGuard restaurant software for over 15 years,
Prior to CostGuard our recipe costs were figured by hand with a calculator and costing sheets. This was done on a quarterly basis.
CostGuard allows us to have updated costs on recipes quickly. Before CostGuard, it would have taken me days to update all of the costing sheets, now it is only a matter of minutes and every recipe is updated. The reports are easy to read and understand. The information that CostGuard supplies helps us stay on top of food cost issues and make quick decision. It is also a great tool to use when developing recipes as you can see immediately what the cost of the product is as you add or change ingredients and amounts.
CostGuard is very user friendly. Setting up the program was easy. Anytime I have had a problem or question (which is rare), the support has been quick and helpful. Customer Support will walk you step by step through what you need to do. CostGuard has always made me feel like a valued customer and that they are proud of their product and service.
Beth Tay, Supervisor of Menu and Product Development
Furr’s Fresh Buffet, Lubbock, Texas