Recipes and costing
Recipes turn your item costs into menu costs. Build a recipe once and the app keeps its cost current from then on. When an ingredient’s price changes, every recipe that uses it recalculates on its own.
Two kinds of recipe
- Prep recipes are things you make in batches and use as ingredients in other recipes: cold brew concentrate, vanilla syrup, house dressing, cookie dough.
- Menu recipes are what you actually sell: a latte, a sandwich, a slice of cake.
Nesting: recipes inside recipes
A menu recipe can use a prep recipe as an ingredient, and prep recipes can use other prep recipes. A vanilla latte might be espresso + milk + vanilla syrup, where the syrup is itself a prep recipe of sugar, water, and vanilla. Costs roll up through every layer. When the price of sugar goes up, the syrup’s cost updates, and every drink that uses the syrup updates too. You never re-cost anything by hand.
Yields: what a batch makes
Every prep recipe has a yield: what one batch produces, like 2 liters of syrup or 24 cookies. The yield is what makes per-serving math work: if a batch costs $9.60 and yields 2 L, the app knows syrup costs $0.48 per 100 mL, so a 20 mL pump costs about 10¢. If you scale a batch up or down, the per-unit cost stays honest.
Trim and yield
A head of lettuce doesn’t all reach the plate. Pull the core and outer leaves and a 16 oz head might give you 9.6 oz you can use. To cost that honestly, make a one-ingredient prep recipe called Prepped Lettuce: 1 head in, 9.6 oz out. Your sandwiches then use Prepped Lettuce by the ounce, and the loss is built into its cost. Building recipes that cost right walks through it step by step. The waste log is for things you actually throw out, not for expected trim.
Making more or less than one batch
Open a prep recipe and there’s a Batches control above the ingredients. The + and − buttons move a quarter batch at a time, anywhere from 0.25 up to 20, so a half batch of syrup takes two taps and no mental math. For an odd amount, tap the number itself and type it: 1.7 batches is fine.
Ingredient quantities, the yield, and the batch cost all scale to what you pick. This only changes what’s on your screen. The recipe stays as written, nothing is saved, and your counts and costs don’t move. Reset puts it back to one batch.
Units in recipes
Recipe ingredients are measured in real kitchen units: grams, ounces, milliliters, fluid ounces, each. The app only offers units it can actually convert for that item (based on the item’s pack size and units), and it checks again when you save, so you can’t accidentally build a recipe whose cost can’t be calculated. Packaging-style units like "case" aren’t used inside recipes; countable things are measured as "each."
Plating photos
A menu recipe can carry one photo of the finished plate, so the team can see how it should look and every plate goes out the same way. Managers and admins add it from Edit recipe with the Upload photo button under Instructions. It’s optional, and a recipe without a photo looks exactly as it did before. When one exists, everyone who can open the recipe, staff included, sees it on the recipe page. Snap it on your phone and upload it straight from the camera roll; iPhone HEIC photos work too. The app shrinks and converts every photo before it is stored, so a full-size shot ends up around 100 KB.
Training videos
A menu or prep recipe can carry one “How it’s done” video, so a new hire can watch how the item is made. Managers and admins paste a link into the How it’s done video field under Instructions when creating or editing a recipe, and everyone who can open the recipe can watch it. Read more about training videos.
Who sees costs
Staff can open recipes and see ingredients and quantities (useful as a build sheet behind the bar), but cost figures are hidden from staff entirely. Managers and admins see full costing. More in Your team and roles.
Where recipe costs show up
- On each recipe: total batch cost and per-yield cost.
- In food cost reports: recipes power your theoretical food cost.
- With Square connected: each sale is costed using the recipe mapped to that menu item, so you can see what every drink and dish should have cost you.