Mapping your menu to recipes
Once your point-of-sale is connected, the app knows what you sold but not what each sale cost. Mapping is how you connect the two: point each menu item at a recipe once, and every future sale of it is costed on its own. This works the same whether you’re on Square, Toast, or Clover.
The mapping screen
Each POS has a mappings page (Variation mappings on Square, Item Mappings on Toast and Clover). It lists what you sell and lets you link each one to:
- a menu recipe (the usual case: a latte points at your latte recipe), or
- a prep recipe or a single inventory item, for a straight resale like a bottled drink.
You also set how many of the target one sale uses (usually one). Retail items, gift cards, and merch that have no food cost can be marked Not tracked so they stop showing up as unmapped.
Working the unmapped list
The POS dashboard keeps two review queues: unmapped items (nothing points them at a cost yet) and stale mappings (the POS changed something, like a renamed drink or a new size, so the app flags it for you to re-check instead of guessing). Sales of an unmapped item still sync; they just can’t be costed until you map them, so it’s worth keeping the unmapped count near zero.
Building recipe shells in bulk
If you’re starting from a full menu and no recipes, Create recipes for unmapped items makes an empty recipe for every unmapped item at once and links each one. Each new recipe is a shell: it exists and is mapped, but has no ingredients yet, so it’s flagged as needing ingredients until you fill it in. It’s a fast way to get the whole menu wired up, then you go add ingredients recipe by recipe. Building a recipe straight from a mapping row links it automatically, so you don’t have to come back and map it by hand.
Modifiers and their cost impact
In a café the modifier is often half the drink, so modifiers get their own effects on the Modifier Effects page. You tell the app what each one actually does to the recipe:
| Effect | What it does |
|---|---|
| Add ingredient | Adds something on top, like an extra shot. |
| Swap ingredient | Replaces one ingredient with another, like oat milk for whole milk. |
| Change quantity | Uses more or less of an ingredient (zero removes it). |
| Change packaging | Swaps the cup or packaging. |
| No cost impact | The modifier doesn’t change cost (a note like “extra hot”). |
A modifier can carry more than one effect, applied in order. Each one shows its net cost impact (like +$0.18 or −$0.20), so you can sanity-check your upcharges at a glance. Once configured, a latte with oat milk and an extra shot is costed as exactly that, not as a plain latte. Effects apply from the next sync forward, and past sales re-cost themselves automatically.
Some effects can only be estimated (a “change quantity” swap, where the base amount is recipe-specific). Those show a ~ next to the number so you know it’s approximate rather than exact.
Where mapped sales land
Every mapped, costed sale feeds your food cost reports: the theoretical food cost of everything you sold, and the per-item menu profitability that shows which sellers actually make money.