Recipe Costing

Every recipe carries a cost per serving. It is shown on the recipe card in the library and drives the food-cost figures in Reports.

How it is calculated

Sum the cost of the ingredients, divide by the recipe's yield.

Each ingredient row on a recipe has a quantity, a unit, and a cost per unit. Multiply and add, then divide by yield servings. A recipe yielding 50 with $210 of ingredients costs $4.20 a serving.

The figure is calculated and stored when you save the recipe, not worked out fresh each time it is shown. In practice that only matters in one way: a recipe whose ingredients were last edited before this behavior was corrected may still be carrying an out-of-date number. Open it, save it, and the stored cost is rebuilt from what is actually on the ingredient list.

That is the whole model. There is no labor cost, no overhead allocation, no waste or shrinkage factor, and no distinction between as-purchased and as-prepared quantities. If you buy a whole fish and use half of it, the recipe needs to say half — the software will not work that out for you.

Making the number real

Cost per serving is only as good as two things:

1. Every ingredient has a cost per unit. One blank drags the whole recipe's cost down and makes the dish look more profitable than it is.
2. The yield is honest. A recipe that says it yields 50 but actually plates 40 understates cost by a quarter.

Both are easy to leave half-done, and neither produces a warning.

Where the cost is used

• On the recipe card in the Recipe Library
• Scaled with the recipe when a prep plan is generated for a guest count
• In Reports → Recipes, ranked so you can see which dishes cost most
• In Reports → Overview as the Avg Food Cost percentage, once orders have both a paid invoice and a recorded food cost

Reading it against a menu price

KitchenSync does not hold a per-dish selling price, so it cannot show you a per-dish margin. Menus carry a price per person, and Reports compares that against food cost at the ORDER level.

For a single dish, compare its cost per serving against what that course is worth to you by hand. A 30% food cost is the common target for plated catering; where yours should sit depends on your market and your labor.

What is not here

No cost history or trend line, no supplier price comparison, no automatic reprice when an ingredient's cost changes, and no alert when a recipe drifts past a target percentage. Updating an ingredient cost updates the recipe from that point on; it does not tell you it happened.