Adding new ingredients, updating existing ingredients and keeping ingredient costs up to date are critical tasks in making sure a recipe costing system does what it’s supposed to do – that is, calculating the cost of recipes, recommending menu price changes and helping you to stay profitable. The Recipe Coster provides two methods for performing this task. The on-screen form and uploading a MS-Excel (xlsx) or Apple Numbers spreadsheet file.
Using the On-Screen Form
Log into The Recipe Coster and click on ‘To Recipe Coster’ and ‘The Ingredient Maintenance – Add, Change and Delete Ingredients’ table should appear.
Adding New Ingredients
To add a new ingredient, click on the ‘Add Ingredient’ icon and the following form appears:
Enter your desired ingredient code, the ingredient description, the pack size (or pack quantity), select the pack unit of measure from the drop-down list, the pack description and the pack cost. You can accept the default ingredient yield percent or enter a specific yield percent for this item. The ingredient yield percent represents the usable quantity for this ingredient after normal losses or waste. Click on ‘Submit’ when done.
Here’s an example of a completed ‘Add Ingredient’ form:
Updating Existing Ingredients
To update an existing ingredient, scroll through the table to find the ingredient to be updated and click on it. The ‘Edit Ingredient’ form opens as shown below:
Enter the new ingredient cost, make any other necessary edits and then press submit.
Using a Spreadsheet file to Update Ingredients
Probably the easiest way to maintain your ingredient data is with a spreadsheet program. The Recipe Coster can read and write spreadsheet files in XLSX and CSV (comma separated values) formats. These formats can be used with Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers and almost every other spreadsheet program. We’ll walk through the process of downloading the ingredient list, making updates and then uploading the revised ingredient list to The Recipe Coster. We’ll work with MS-Excel xlsx spreadsheet files for this example.
Downloading the Ingredient List
From the Ingredient Maintenance table click on the ‘Print Ingredient List’ icon.
Select XLSX (MS-Excel) file type and click on ‘Download File’. The XLSX spreadsheet file is downloaded to your PC or device. The file name will be formatted with the date and time, for example, ‘Ingredient_List-02230706_223707.xlsx’.
Open the file with your spreadsheet program and make any desired updates. You can modify anything other than the ingredient code. The Recipe Coster uses the ingredient code to identity the item being updated.
You can change the unit of measure but be aware that if this ingredient is being used in a recipe, you’ll need stay within the same unit of measure category. In other words, if the unit of measure is currently a volume measure like tablespoon, you can only change to another volume measure. Make sure you spell the units of measure correctly. If you make a mistake The Recipe Coster will catch it later when validating the uploaded file.
Uploading the Spreadsheet File
From the Ingredient Maintenance table click on the ‘Add/Update Ingredients from an XLSX or CSV Spreadsheet File’ icon.
Select File type: XLSX, Action: ‘Add New and Update Existing Ingredients’ and then click on ‘Browse…’ to find the spreadsheet file you just modified to Upload. On your PC, Mac or other device ‘Browse’ will open a window where you can find the spreadsheet you just modified.
After you’ve found the file click on ‘Upload File’ and The Recipe Coster will validate your ingredient file, notify you of any errors and then proceed to update your ingredients. Assuming you haven’t added any additional ingredients through the on-screen form you can continue to use and upload the same spreadsheet file for future ingredient updates and ingredient cost changes.
Recosting Recipes
The final step after updating ingredient costs is to re-cost recipes. Click on the ‘Recost Recipes’ icon and your recipes will be validated and updated with the new ingredient costs, menu items will be re-costed and new recommended prices calculated.
Reviewing Recipe Costs and Menu Prices
The last step once you’ve updated ingredient costs is to see how if any changes are needed to your menu prices. You’ll need to look at the ‘SubRecipe/Yield List’ accessible from the Recipe Maintenance screen.
Switch to the Recipe Maintenance screen, double click on any recipe and then click on the ‘Add, Change, Delete Recipe Yields screen to bring it to the front.
Click on the ‘Print Subrecipe/Yield and Menu Pricing Report’. In the case we’ll select Microsoft Excel xlsx file format and we’ll exclude yields without prices. ( Recipe yields without prices are normally subrecipes and not menu items.) Click on ‘Download file’ and you should get a spreadsheet that looks like this and see at a glance which menu prices need to be adjusted.
