There are two ways to get food cost and profit figures out of the Back Office, and you can mix them freely across your menu:
- Enter a Cost Price on each item. Quickest to set up — you type in what the item costs you, and the reports work out your margin. Good if you already know your per-item costs.
- Build recipes from ingredients. More work up front, but the cost updates automatically when an ingredient price changes, and it also drives stock control and usage reporting.
Recipes take priority. If an item has a menu recipe, the reports use the recipe's calculated cost and ignore anything typed into Cost Price. Items without a recipe fall back to their Cost Price.
Note: Both methods feed the same two reports — Food Cost Margins and Menu Engineering. You don't have to pick one for your whole menu. It's perfectly normal to have recipes on your main dishes and a Cost Price on drinks and sides.
The quick way: enter a Cost Price per item
- Go to Management > Menu > Menu Setup.
- Open the product you want to cost.
- Enter what the item costs you in the Cost Price field, then save.
- If the product has sizes or variations (for example Small and Large), enter a Cost Price on each one. A variation's own Cost Price is used in preference to the product's.
Note: If your company uses a shared company menu, Menu Setup appears at Company level (no store selected in the switcher) rather than at Store level.
Leave Cost Price at 0 for anything you haven't costed yet — the reports treat 0 as "not set" rather than as a free item, and simply show no margin for that row.
Once saved, jump straight to viewing your reports — there's nothing else to set up.
The detailed way: build recipes from ingredients
- Go to Management > Stock Control > Ingredients
Add a single ingredient by clicking New Ingredient in the top right corner.
Once ingredient has been added > SAVE. This will populate a row in the table but also enable the user to export the spreadsheet into excel.
- Export template into excel in order to easily add ingredients.
Click the export button and select Excel Export.
- This will now open a spreadsheet with the template. Now add all ingredients with fields populated. Save the spreadsheet with a filename.
- Once completed an excel import needs to be done.
Click the import button and select Excel Import.
Locate the spreadsheet that was saved and this will upload the ingredients from the spreadsheet to the table in the back office.
- Now select Batch Recipes and click to add a new one.
Add details of batch recipe. See example below 'Fries'. (Note that Total Food Cost is calculated per batch).
- Now select Menu Recipes and click to add a new one.
Add details of menu recipes. See example below for 'Classic Fillet Burger'
- Now that ingredients, batch recipes and menu recipes have been added, your food cost figures are ready to view.
Viewing your food cost and margins
Two reports use your costs, whether those came from a recipe or from a Cost Price.
Food Cost Margins
Go to Reports > Menu Reports > Food Cost Margins, at Store level with a store selected in the switcher.
Pick a category to see, for every item in it:
- Menu price and net price (your price with VAT taken off)
- Food cost and food cost %
- Gross margin and gross margin %
- Suggested selling price, worked back from the target food cost percentage set in Setup > Inventory Setup > Setup (at Company level, with no store selected). This defaults to 30%.
Menu Engineering
Go to Reports > Menu Reports > Menu Engineering.
This one looks at what actually sold over a date range, and ranks items by the total profit they contributed — how many you sold, the cost per unit, contribution margin per item, and the total margin each item brought in. It's the report to use when deciding what to promote, re-price, or drop.
Why an item shows no margin
If an item shows a food cost of 0.00 and a 100% gross margin, it has neither a menu recipe nor a Cost Price. Add either one and the figures appear on the next report run.