Food cost you can see, down to the ingredient.
Recipes explode to raw components. Sales say what you should have used. Counts say what you did. The difference is the number that pays for the software.
From the recipe card to the variance report.
Recipes that explode to raw ingredients
A pizza is dough, sauce, cheese and toppings; the dough is flour, water, yeast and time. Recipes nest, so one sold item resolves all the way down to the things you actually buy — and every explosion is kept, so a costing you queried last month still shows the recipe as it was that month.
Theoretical against actual
Sales tell you what you should have used. Counts tell you what you did. The gap between them is the only food-cost number worth acting on — and it is reported per store and per period, not as one blended figure that hides the site with the problem.
Transfers from a central kitchen
Product made in a commissary and sent out to stores is costed as it moves, so the receiving site carries what it actually consumed and the kitchen is not left holding the whole group's food cost. Transfers between stores work the same way.
Counts, including the ones worth doing daily
Full physical counts on your own cycle, plus a short list of the items that actually move the number — the expensive proteins and the easily-walked-off. Those get counted often and alert on their own, instead of waiting for month end to find out.
Purchasing, vendors and what you last paid
Purchase orders, vendor catalogues and receiving against them, with the last price paid held per item per vendor — so a costing uses what the flour cost this week, and a price that moves shows up as a cost change rather than a mystery variance.
Units that match how you buy and how you cook
Flour arrives in 50 lb sacks and a recipe calls for 340 grams. Conversion factors are held per item, so purchasing, recipes and counts can each use the unit that makes sense without anyone doing arithmetic in their head at 6am.
A commissary is the point where food cost stops being obvious.
One kitchen is simple: what you bought, minus what you counted, is what you used. Add a central kitchen producing for several sites and the question changes — the flour is bought once, the dough is made once, and it is eaten in eight places. Most systems answer this by putting the whole cost in one bucket and leaving managers to argue about it.
Produce
The commissary makes dough against its own recipe. The ingredients leave its inventory at what they actually cost, and the output carries that cost forward.
Transfer
Product moves out to each store as a costed transfer. The kitchen's inventory goes down, the store's goes up, and the value travels with it.
Reconcile
Each store's sales explode to ingredients and are compared against what it received and counted. Variance lands on the site that caused it.
The result a multi-site operator actually wants: a variance number per store that a manager can be held to, and a commissary that is not blamed for what happened after the van left.
It needs your sales and your invoices. Not your registers.
Theoretical usage comes from what sold; actual comes from counts, receipts and transfers. If your tills are ours, that arrives on its own. If they are not, the sales data can be imported — which means the costing side can be useful long before anyone discusses changing a point of sale.
Know what the food cost, not what it should have.
Recipe costing, costed transfers from a central kitchen, and variance by store.
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