Documentation/ Master records and catalogues/ Recipe costings

Recipe costings: what they are and how to build one

A recipe costing is the breakdown of what a dish or a prepared product costs: what goes into it, how much of each thing, and what that comes to. The application handles the hard part, the price of each ingredient, by taking it from what you have actually bought.

Management › Recipe Costing (AI)

The recipe's details

Yield and portions answer different questions. Yield says how much the preparation produces; portions, how many parts it is divided into. A sauce might yield two litres and have no portions, because it is not served on its own.

The four kinds of ingredient

Every line on the recipe is one of these four kinds, and the kind decides where its cost comes from:

The choice matters. Product gives the most accurate cost, because it points at a real item with a real price. Raw material stands up better to a change of supplier, because it does not depend on your going on buying the same reference. Manual is the way out for whatever is not in the system: labour, energy, or an ingredient not bought against a document.

The fields on a line

Wastage

Wastage is the percentage lost between what you buy and what reaches the plate: the trimmings from preparing something, the evaporation in cooking, the offcuts from a joint. It is given as a percentage and takes values from zero to ninety-nine.

Its effect on cost is direct. If only seven hundred grams of a kilo are usable, the real cost of those seven hundred grams is the cost of the whole kilo. Ignoring wastage understates the cost systematically, and on products with a lot of waste the difference is large.

Where each line's cost comes from

Each line shows the source of the cost it used:

And where it could not be worked out, the line says no cost resolved. That is the warning to act on: while there are unresolved lines, the costing's total is incomplete.

There are three usual causes: the item has never been bought, the raw material has no product with a price, or the document's unit does not match the recipe's.

Choosing a raw material's cost

Where a line is a raw material, the application can take the average across all the products in that category. A button lets you choose the cost and see the candidates: each product with its last price, its unit, the date of the document it came from and its cost per base unit.

If the units are not consistent, the screen warns you that the products' units are not consistent or prices are missing, that the average is a rough guide only, and that you should pick a particular product.

Products whose unit is not recognised are left out of the average, and the screen flags that on the row itself. If none of them has a price, it says so outright.

Sub-recipes: nested costings

A recipe marked as a preparation can be used as an ingredient in another. That is what lets you build a real kitchen's structure: a base sauce that goes into five dishes is costed once, and its cost carries through.

Two rules:

• A recipe cannot be used as a sub-recipe of itself. The application stops you.
• A recipe used by another cannot be deleted while it is still linked: it tells you the recipe is used as a sub-recipe of another and has to be unlinked first.

When a sub-recipe's cost changes, the recipes that use it have to be recalculated to pick the new value up.

Updating costs

The calculation is not continuous: you set it off. There are two actions, and the difference matters:

On a recipe with unsaved changes, the application tells you to save the recipe before updating costs. And a recipe that has not yet been calculated shows as pending.

Worth recalculating fairly regularly, at least when seasonal prices change, because the costs reflect what was bought up to the last recalculation, not what was bought today.

Things that come up

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Last reviewed: 11 September 2026 · The Dijit.app team