Restaurant costing guide · PrepSheet
A supplier pack price can change the cost of a whole family of dishes while the menu, recipe name and printed prep sheet still look exactly the same.
This is the quiet version of a kitchen margin problem. Nothing goes visibly wrong during service. The same prep is portioned, the same tickets arrive, and the sheet still prints. The error only appears when somebody checks the number underneath the dish.
The kitchen buys a pack, but the recipe uses a quantity. Between those two points there may be trim, cooking loss, reduction, or a different usable yield. A spreadsheet can have perfectly correct formulas and still answer yesterday’s question if the pack size or yield assumption is out of date.
The ingredient that matters is not always the most expensive one. It may be a chicken prep inside a curry, sandwich, pie and staff meal; a base sauce used in several recipes; or a garnish that becomes a batch by the end of the week. The useful question is not only “what did this recipe cost?” It is “what else used the same preparation?”
That is where a single-dish calculation stops being enough. Before service, the operator needs a short list of the linked dishes that need a decision, with the changed assumption visible.
Use the free calculator with one current recipe and record the pack size, quantity, yield and portion count. Then compare the result with the sheet the kitchen is actually using. If the assumptions disagree, you have found a review task — not a reason to hide the difference.
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For operators who need to follow linked preparations across a menu, the Pricebook beta is the next step. It is a working prototype, not a promise that every kitchen workflow is solved.