Basic Recipe Management - FAQs

Overview:

In COGS-Well, recipe management means adding the ingredients and portions that are used to produce a recipe. Recipe Items can be set up for recipes that you prepare in a batch to use in other recipes ("Prep Items") and for items that you sell ("Sales Items").

You have the option in COGS-Well to set up recipes for food, liquor, beer, wine, and/or non-alcoholic beverages. COGS-Well will import all of the items that you sell (Sales Items) from your POS system and you then have the option to add recipes to some or all of these Sales Items.

Prepared Item Recipes:

Many restaurants have inventory tied up in what we call "Prepared Items". Examples of prepared items are; tubs of vegetables that have been prepared for use, sauces prepared in bulk, meat or seafood portions cut in advance, salad dressings made in batches, soups made in batches, etc.

The inventory items that are ingredients in these prepared items are included in your purchase costs and if you only count raw inventory items at the end of a period, you will not get credit for the unused inventory items that are still in stock, but in Prepared Items.

We recommend that if you produce and use a significant quantity lot of prepared items, you create recipes for at least some of them and include them as items that you count in inventory.

Menu Modeling:

Menu Modeling can be done for any Sales Item once you have added a recipe (the ingredients) for that item. Menu Modeling enables you to compare the cost to prepare the Sales Item (Theoretical Cost) to the Retail Price to determine a Retail Theo Cost % for the item. You can also add a Model Price to see the cost % or add a Target cost % to see what the Target price should be.

Summary:

You do not have to create recipes for everything you produce or sell to enjoy some of the benefits of setting up Recipe Items. You can create recipes for Prepared Items so you count and receive credit for them in your ending inventory valuation. You can also perform Menu Modeling for Sales Items that are new or that you want to evaluate.

There are also options to do more with Recipe Items if you set them up for all or most of your Sales Items. COGS-Well offers Menu Analytics that will help you evaluate Sales Items based on their profit and popularity. COGS-Well also offers Variance Analysis to compare theoretical costs and inventory usage to actual costs and inventory usage.