Recipe
Costing SoftwareThe benefit from using such a program, is its capacity to update prices for items used in all your recipes automatically. When price changes are made to the food list, the recipe is updated with the new cost. Something that cannot be done when costing is done manually. A feature that took me awhile to find use for was the ingredient search. For example, when making a search for butter, it would list all the recipes that include butter as an ingredient. I found using this feature was a tremendous help. When meat suppliers offered specials I entered the items on sale into the program. This would allow me to see if I was able to use and sell that item. I certainly saved a nice amount of money that way!
Another neat feature allows you to change the food cost percent, calculate your sales price, change the selling price and it will calculate the recipes food cost. This makes finding the right price for daily specials etc. much more accurate then simply guessing. Some ingredient prices can be quite volatile. For that purpose there is a temporary price feature that lets you calculate your recipe based on the fluctuating prices for the particular ingredient. By using this feature, it allows accurate updating rather than using the famous saying "add 50 cents for safety".
The recipe pricing report is an absolute asset for the Food and Beverage manager. With the ability of viewing all the recipes at once, their cost, sales price and food cost percentage, controlling food costs is much easier. You can really take advantage of this feature and use it for drink recipes too. Since it is usually the chef that needs to write the instructions of how to prepare his/her creations, recipe costing software is really a must! To be able to provide customers with a consistent product, one requires recipes with good instructions as well as employees trained on these instructions. There really is more to recipe costing software than meets the eye.
Written by Marcel Schoch
Copyright 1996
