Recipes & bill of materials

When what you sell is made from other things you stock, a recipe (or bill of materials) links them, so selling the finished item depletes its components. Manage them under Analytics → Recipes & BOM.

Why it matters

Without it, a burger sells and your stock of buns, patties and cheese stays untouched — until a count reveals a hole nobody can explain. With it, the ingredient stock moves at the moment of sale, and your food or material cost is real rather than estimated.

Building a recipe

Pick the finished item, then add each component with the quantity used. Units matter: if the ingredient is stocked in kilograms, express the recipe in kilograms. A recipe that mixes grams into a kilogram-stocked item is the classic cause of an inventory count drifting by a factor of a thousand.

Cost and margin

The recipe totals the cost of its components, giving true cost of goods for the finished item and therefore a real margin. When an ingredient's cost changes, the built item's cost follows — which is exactly when you want to revisit its price.

Sub-recipes

Components can themselves be built items — a sauce made in-house and used in three dishes. Define it once and reference it, so a change to the sauce flows through everywhere it is used.

Yield and waste

Build in realistic yield. If a joint gives 80% usable meat, the recipe should reflect that rather than the raw weight, or your costs will read better than they are.

Beyond food

The same mechanism suits any assembled product — a gift hamper, a workshop kit, a made-up part. Anything sold as one thing and stocked as several.

Note: your business can rename menu items (Settings → POS Configuration → Menu Labels), so the names in your menu may differ from those shown here.