Skip to main content
All CollectionsFood Costing
Costing your recipes
Costing your recipes
Updated over 3 weeks ago

Please note: only users with the "Edit Recipes" permission can cost out recipes.

Before you can cost out recipes, the following prerequisites must be completed:

We also recommend you read the following articles to best understand costing concepts, terminology, and workflows.

Now that your vendor items are created and mapped to items, you're ready to start costing. In recipes, both items and component recipes are costed using the defined units of measurement and quantities.

Costing out items within a recipe

Enable true costing

First, ensure the "True Costing" icon is enabled in the "Ingredients & Prep" step while editing a recipe.

With true costing enabled, "$" icons will appear next to each ingredient.

Understanding the "$" icon

The $ is an indication of the costing status for that item, and also a button for modifying ingredient and purchase details, if necessary.

An orange $ indicates there are missing details in order to cost out that ingredient.

Clicking the orange icon will tell you what is required.

Typically, it's a missing defined unit of measurement and/or unit quantity.

*Other reasons for an orange $ include:

  • No vendor item mapped to that ingredient (see here)

  • The current vendor item mapped to the item doesn't contain sufficient price and unit details (see here)

  • Missing required item conversion (see here)

All of these reasons are covered in the prerequisites noted above.

A green $ indicates there is proper costing information coming through, congrats!

When costing details are present, the cost will be based on the unit and amount entered on that ingredient.

Prep methods altering costs

If you specify a prep method to an item within a recipe, and that method is also created within the item itself, the yield % associated to that method will affect the cost.

Example cost using a prep method with no yield % associated to it:

Example cost of the same prep method with a 50% yield associated to it:

Additional tips

The total cost of the recipe will appear orange until all items have been costed out

You can also click on this total amount to see the breakdown amount for each item. Green text indicates the item/component recipe is costing out properly, orange text indicates costing is not coming through.

Costing out component recipes as ingredients

Component recipes are technically recipes as they contain their own ingredients and prep instructions. Like recipes, all the ingredients will be costed out in a component recipe using the same instructions as above.

Now, how do you factor a cost for this component recipe when it's used within a recipe as an ingredient? That's where recipe yield comes in.

Let's use the example of "Carrot Ponzu" in this recipe, which is actually a component recipe. The $ is green indicating all costing is coming through properly, so let's look at how this is working.

Clicking the $ provides a button to "Edit recipe cost" since this is a component recipe and not an individual ingredient.

Directing to the "Ingredients and Prep" tab of this Carrot Ponzu recipe, we can see all the ingredients are properly costed out using the above steps in Costing out ingredients within a recipe. This then gives us a total cost of $7.78.

Now that we have a total cost, we need to ensure there is a yield associated to this recipe that relates to how we will be using it as an ingredient in other recipes.

For example, if I use my component recipe as an ingredient within other recipes in cups (volume unit), I will need to define a recipe yield with a volume unit. If I use it as an ingredient within recipes in grams (weight unit), I will need to define a recipe yield with a weight unit.

Clicking to the "General" tab we can see that a yield of "600 grams" is specified on this recipe. Opsi now knows that 600 grams of Carrot Ponzu = $7.78.

Going back to our original recipe that Carrot Ponzu is being used within as an ingredient, we had specified "60 grams".

Because we know 600 grams of Carrot Ponzu costs $7.78, opsi can determine that the 60 grams being used in this example costs $0.78.

To recap, when costing a component recipe as an ingredient, make sure that:

• All items within the component recipe are costed out.
• Your recipe specifies a yield and yield unit that match the unit vertical used for the component recipe in other recipes.

Did this answer your question?