Build and price your menu

What it does. Prices what you sell from what you actually pay for it. Record a cost once on an ingredient, and Better Cater carries it into the recipe that uses the ingredient, the menu item built from that recipe, and any package that item sits in. Every menu item then shows its cost and its margin beside the price you charge.

When you’d use it. Setting your catalog up, and every time a supplier price moves and you want to know which dishes it hit.

Before you start. Nothing has to exist first. Items you already priced by hand keep working, and you can add a recipe underneath one later to swap its typed cost for a calculated one. Building your menu covers getting the catalog in without costs.

The chain

Four lists link together, and each one hands its cost to the next.

• Ingredients, under Kitchen, hold what you pay a supplier for one unit.
• Recipes, under Kitchen, list the ingredients a batch uses and work out what the batch costs and what one unit of it costs.
• Menu items, under Catalog, are what the client reads and pays for. Link a recipe and the item gets a cost and a margin.
• Packages, under Catalog, bundle menu items at one price, with the calculated cost of the contents beside it.

Cost sits at the bottom of that chain and travels up. Reprice butter once and every recipe, menu item and package built on it re-costs itself, so there is no list of dish costs to go and update by hand.

Price your ingredients

Click Kitchen in the top menu, then Ingredients. Each row is one thing you buy, with the unit you keep it in, the vendor you buy it from, and what one of those units costs: a dozen of something at $3.99/dz, a pound of something else at $4.25/lb. Search by name finds one in a long list, and the pencil opens it.

Adding one takes two steps, because Better Cater works the cost out from a real purchase instead of asking you to do the division.

1. Click New Ingredient.
2. Enter the Name.
3. Pick the Base unit, the unit your recipes will measure it in, like lb, oz or each.
4. Pick the Vendor if you buy it from one you have already set up, or leave it on No vendor.
5. Click Save.

The ingredient exists now, but its Cost per Unit reads “unpriced” until you say what you paid. Open it and click Edit, and under the details you get a Purchase card.

1. In I bought, enter how many you bought and what you call them, like 2 and “cases”. What you type there is printed after purchase quantities on the shopping list, exactly as you typed it.
2. In Each one has, enter how much is inside one of them, in the base unit. Two cases with twelve dozen in each is 12.
3. In Total paid, enter what the whole purchase cost.
4. Set Bought from if this delivery came from a different supplier.
5. Click Record Purchase.

What you’ll see. The Cost per Unit card fills in with what one unit really cost, dated. Two cases at twelve dozen each for $95.76 is $3.99 a dozen. Every recipe using that ingredient recalculates immediately, and so does every menu item and package above those recipes.

Record a new purchase whenever the price moves. The latest one is the one your costs use, and it is the ingredient nobody has repriced since last year that quietly understates every dish it is in.

Build a recipe

Click Kitchen in the top menu, then Recipes. A recipe is a batch: the ingredients that go into it, and how much one batch makes.

1. Click New Recipe.
2. Enter the Name.
3. Set Yield Quantity and Yield Unit to how much one batch makes. A pan of scrambled eggs that comes out at 8 lb has a yield of 8 lb. A tray of biscuits that comes out as 12 servings has a yield of 12 ea.
4. Save, then click Add Ingredient for each ingredient, with the Quantity and Unit this recipe uses. Add Sub-Recipe pulls in a sauce or a component you built separately.

What you’ll see. Each ingredient lands in the Components table with its own cost, and two cards at the top keep up as you go: Total Cost for the whole batch, and Cost per Unit for one unit of the yield. A batch costing $31.55 for 8 lb is $3.94 per pound. That per-unit figure is the number the menu item will use.

The longer walkthrough, including sub-recipes and what an unpriced ingredient does to the total, is in add a recipe to a menu item.

Create the menu item and link the recipe

Click Catalog in the top menu, then Menu Items, then New Menu Item.

1. Enter the Name the client will read on the proposal.
2. Pick the Item Group, like Appetizers or Entrées. It is a label on the item, not a price or a rule.
3. Pick the Tax Category, which says what kind of thing this is. Whether tax is actually charged depends on your tax settings.
4. Click into Linked recipe and pick the recipe you built. The search results show each recipe’s yield and its cost per unit, so two similar ones are easy to tell apart.
5. Answer Portion size if it appears. It appears when the recipe yields a weight or a volume, because a batch of 8 lb does not say how much one plate gets. Type the portion and pick its unit, like 5 oz. The line underneath reminds you what the batch makes and what it costs.
6. Enter the Price you charge for one.
7. Click Create Menu Item.

What you’ll see. Cost is locked while a recipe is linked, and it fills itself in from the portion: 5 oz out of an 8 lb batch that cost $31.55 works out at $1.23 per item. On the saved item, Pricing reads Price, then Cost with a line like “5 oz of Scrambled eggs with chives” underneath it, then Margin as a percentage of the price. The recipe name there links back to the recipe.

A recipe that already yields a count, like 12 ea, needs no portion size. One unit of the yield is one serving, so the item takes the recipe’s cost per unit as it stands.

Bundle items into a package

A package is the set menu you quote again and again, sold to the client as one line. Click Catalog, then Packages, then New Package, give it a name, a description and a price, and click Save. Open it and click Add Menu Item for each dish it includes, setting how many of that item come in one package.

What you’ll see. Package Details shows your Price and, beside it, Calculated Cost per package, added up from what each menu item inside costs times the quantity you set. The Menu Items card underneath lists the contents, each row reading like “2 pieces per package” when the item has a unit set on it, and just “2 per package” when it does not.

Those two numbers are the check to make before you quote. The package page shows the price and the calculated cost side by side and no margin, so read the gap yourself. A calculated cost above the price means the package as built loses money at that price, which is worth knowing before a client sees it rather than after.

The calculated cost is only as honest as what sits under it. Items with a typed cost, or with a recipe holding an unpriced ingredient, pull it low. Building and editing packages is covered in create a package, and what they do across the product in packages overview.

Where the numbers land

Add a menu item or a package to an event from the event’s Menu tab and the price and the cost come with it. Nothing gets typed on the event.

On that tab a package sits in the Packages card as one priced line, with its contents listed underneath showing both the total the event needs and the ratio it came from, like “260 pieces” over “2 pieces per package”. Event Totals on the right adds Menu Items, service charge and tax into the Total the client sees. Event Totals is the selling side only: the cost you just built shows up on the event’s Billing tab, in the Your profit tile, and across many events in the Profit analysis report.

Every line has a Quantity calculation behind the pencil on its row, and what it offers depends on where the line sits. An item added on its own chooses between Per person, which follows the guest count, and Set amount, which holds the number you type. An item inside a package chooses between Per package, which multiplies by the number of packages, and Set amount. Either way, Set amount is what keeps one cake on a 130 guest wedding at one cake while the rest of the menu follows the headcount. The detail is in set a package item to a set amount.

Those quantities are what the kitchen works from. On the kitchen report each menu item shows the quantity to make, and an item whose recipe yields a count also gets a batch count, like “12 batches (10 ea per batch)”. An item whose recipe yields a weight or a volume gets the quantity but no batch count, because a pound is not a batch. On the shopping list the recipes behind those quantities are broken back down into their ingredients, totalled across the whole list, and converted into the unit you buy in with the vendor beside them. Run the event day walks both documents.

Good to know.

• Item groups are labels. They file an item in your catalog and travel with it onto every event, but they do not order or group anything on a proposal, a banquet event order, a kitchen report or a packing list. What prints in what order comes from the up and down arrows on the event’s Menu tab. There is more in organize your menu with item groups.
• An ingredient’s base unit can be changed to another unit of the same kind: grams to pounds, cups to tablespoons, each to dozen. Open the ingredient, choose the new unit and save. Recipes that use it keep their lines and their costs exactly as they were, and recording a purchase in the new unit is what moves the cost onto it. The list only offers units of the same kind, so a spice you set up in tablespoons cannot be moved to pounds.
• A menu item with no recipe still takes a cost, you just type it yourself. It shows a margin the same way, but it will not move when an ingredient price changes.
• The Cost field on a menu item stays locked while a recipe is linked. Clear the Linked recipe field to unlock it and go back to a cost you set yourself.
• The yield unit you pick on a recipe has a second effect further down. A count yield is what gives the kitchen report a batch count, and a weight or volume yield is what asks the menu item for a portion size. Pick whichever describes the dish honestly rather than the one that produces the number you want.
• A package price is yours to set. Better Cater never prices a package from its contents, it only tells you what the contents cost. If a package holds an item set to a set amount, that item’s cost is listed separately, as a “+ set amount” line under the calculated cost.