"John, thank you very, very much for the new Version 2.0 of your Recipe Costing Workbook. This thing is amazing; you've gone from a Ford to a Mercedes Benz! It's good that I came aboard when you started with the earlier, simpler version so I can, hopefully, adjust to all the bells and whistles you've added. I especially appreciate the Recipe and Sub-Recipe Search feature, as I had so many various Marie Callender dessert recipes that were difficult to find. I better get back to work, but again I want to express my appreciation for the great work you are doing and how relevant & helpful it is to those of us in the field. Best regards with gratitude"
Bob Beckmann, Marie Callender Pie Shops, Whittier, CA

Main Menu

The workbook automatically opens to an easy to navigate Menu screen where all tasks are a simple click away. Return to the Main Menu with another click from each screen.

The workbook is divided into three sections:

1. Maintain Food Inventory Items
2. Add/Maintain Recipes (Menu Items)
3. Summary Information

Detailed Instructions are easily accessed from the Main Menu and are also included as an Adobe Acrobat document (PDF file) that accompanies the Workbook

Master Inventory Worksheet

The Inventory Master is divided into multiple food categories (e.g. Meat & Poultry, Fish & Seafood, Produce, Grocery, Dairy) and is designed to record all your purchased food items:

• Use your vendor invoices to enter the "As Purchased" unit and unit price for each item

• Convert "As Purchased" units and unit prices to the way you will be "calling" for each item in your actual recipes. This means defining a recipe unit (e.g. purchase by the pound...use in recipe as ounce) if different from the As Purchased unit.

• Finally you will need to determine a Conversion factor to apply to your recipe unit so that the program can automatically calculate the recipe unit cost for input into your recipes.

• A column is provided for Notes as to how you determined the appropriate conversion for the selected recipe unit. (Product documentation provides detailed explanation of how to calculate your Conversion factors)

Note: inputs on sample page are for demonstration purposes. User will enter their own food products and associated units and unit prices

Count Food Inventory

Use the Inventory Count worksheet to obtain an accurate month end total dollar value (at cost) of all your in stock food items. This value is critical if you are to create a Profit and Loss Statement that accurately reflects your restaurant's actual food cost and food cost percentage!

Simply decide which units you will use to consistently count each of your Inventory items (Inv Count Unit) and make a simple conversion to yield an accurate count unit price (e.g. if you purchase an item by the case but want to count by the "each" then your conversion number will simply be the number of units in the case).  Print out the worksheet and manually enter your Inventory totals as you perform the "physical count". Then return to the worksheet and record the numbers in the appropriate cells. The Count sheet does the rest by automatically calculating the total value (cost) of each item and totals each Inventory category and the grand total of all categories as shown above.

Recipe Search Form

Its easy to find an existing recipe from the Main Menu by clicking on the Find Existing Recipes box. Then select the Menu Category where the recipe has been entered, then just click on the recipe from the list. The recipe template will appear for you to review, print, or edit.

Recipe/Menu Item Templates

The "heart and soul" of this workbook are the Recipe or Menu Item templates. Forty templates are available for each of the four menu categories.

After filling in all the required information for each (name, date, number of portions and menu price) you will document the ingredients, recipe units and number of each required (see above). You now have an option to either manually enter the recipe unit cost for each ingredient (green cell) or to use the AutoLink feature (below) to link your ingredient costs from prior inputs on the Master Inventory worksheet.

Once all the information is entered the template will auto calculate the recipe cost, portion cost, food cost percentage and gross margin contributions as shown above. Each recipe or menu item template also has a section for documenting the process of creating each item (below)

The combination of the recipe template and documentation allows you to create "Standardized Recipes" for every item on your menu!

Sub-Recipe Templates

The recipe costing workbook also accounts for all the sub-recipes that are integrated into the recipes of your fully plated menu items. As an example note the addition of 2.5 oz of Sun Dried Tomato Alfredo sauce in the sample recipe above. This sauce has its own recipe, and the Excel workbook includes 150 Sub-Recipe Templates to accomplish this task. Each sub-recipe can be linked into your main recipes with ease. Note that all the sub-recipes include yield and associated cost per yield unit calculations. This allows you to seamlessly link the unit costs of your sub-recipes directly into the main recipe as  shown above (e.g. $0.05 per ounce of Alfredo Sauce is linked into the Penne Pasta recipe using the AutoLink feature)

Menu Profitability Summary

The Menu Profitability Worksheet automatically links all your recipes, arranged by menu category, into an easy to view and evaluate summary page. All the key statistics are listed for each menu item (portion cost, menu price, food cost %, gross margin (profit). By inputting the total number of each menu item sold for a specific time period (available through your POS system report), this summary yields your restaurant's Theoretical or Ideal Food Cost for the entire menu (as well as for each menu category). It also allows you to perform accurate Menu Engineering tasks to evaluate each menu item's contribution (profit) to your menu, and then to perform
"what if" scenarios by adjusting costs, prices and numbers sold.