Documentation/ Master records and catalogues/ Recipe costings with AI
Recipe costings with AI
Building a costing line by line is work. The breakdown feature lets you paste the recipe's text and get the lines back already separated, with their quantity and unit, and with a suggestion of which product each ingredient corresponds to.
Management › Recipe Costing (AI) › recipe › Break down with AI
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What it does exactly
The breakdown does three things to the text you paste:
- Separates the ingredients, one per line.
- Pulls out the quantity and unit of each.
- Suggests a match with a product or a raw material from your masters.
What it does not do: it works out no costs, it saves nothing off its own bat, and it decides nothing irreversibly. Everything it suggests goes through a review before it enters the recipe.
How to use it
- Open the recipe, new or existing, and press Break down with AI.
- Paste the recipe's text into the box.
- Press Break down.
- Go over the table of results: each ingredient with the match suggested.
- Discard the lines you do not want.
- Press Add to recipe.
- Go over the lines now on the recipe and save.
As it applies them, the application reminds you the job is not finished: it says the ingredients have been added and the recipe needs reviewing and saving.
What text works best
| Works well | Works less well |
|---|---|
| One ingredient per line | A running paragraph with the ingredients inside the method |
| Quantity and unit in front of the name | Quantities in words: "a handful", "to taste" |
| Recognisable ingredient names | Internal names or your own abbreviations |
| The ingredient list on its own | Ingredients mixed in with the method |
Worth tidying the text before you paste it: stripping out the method and leaving just the list improves the result a great deal, and costs less than correcting the lines afterwards.
The 3,000-character limit
The text takes a maximum of 3,000 characters. Go over that and the application warns you the text exceeds 3,000 characters and processes nothing.
Three thousand characters is plenty for any recipe's ingredient list. You reach the limit by pasting the whole recipe, method included, which is exactly what should not be pasted.
For a long recipe book, the way to work is one recipe at a time, not all of them in one block.
The review step
The result does not go straight into the recipe. It is shown in a table with the ingredient as read and the match suggested, and each line can be discarded before you apply them.
Where no similar product was found, the line says no candidates. That does not invalidate it: you can add it anyway and fill the link in by hand later, or leave it as a manual cost line.
Two things are worth looking at closely: that the quantities were read correctly, which is where badly formatted text goes wrong most, and that the matches point at the right product and not at another one with a similar name.
What is left to do afterwards
The breakdown leaves the recipe built, but not finished. What has to be filled in by hand:
- The wastage. A recipe's text does not contain it, and without it the cost comes out below the real figure.
- The lines with no candidate, either linking them or turning them into manual costs.
- The yield, the portions and the selling price, which belong to the recipe's own details and do not come out of the text.
- The cost recalculation, which has to be set off after saving.
Where the text is processed
The breakdown runs on models hosted on Dijit.app's own infrastructure. The text you paste does not leave that perimeter and is not sent to any third-party service.
It is the same policy that governs the rest of the document processing, and the reason the artificial intelligence features do not depend on outside providers.
Things that come up
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| It warns that the text is too long | It is over 3,000 characters. | Paste the ingredient list only, without the method. |
| The ingredients come out jumbled into one line | The text arrived as a running paragraph. | Split it into one ingredient per line before pasting. |
| Every line comes out with no candidates | The masters are empty, or the names bear no resemblance to those in the text. | Add them anyway and link them by hand; the master fills up as documents arrive. |
| The quantities are not right | They came in words or in unusual formats. | Correct them on the recipe before saving. |
| The cost is still blank after applying | The breakdown works out no costs. | Save and set the cost update off. |