Recipes and costing
Recipes turn your item costs into menu costs. Build a recipe once and the app keeps its cost current from then on. When an ingredient’s price changes, every recipe that uses it recalculates on its own.
Two kinds of recipe
- Prep recipes are things you make in batches and use as ingredients in other recipes: cold brew concentrate, vanilla syrup, house dressing, cookie dough.
- Menu recipes are what you actually sell: a latte, a sandwich, a slice of cake.
Nesting: recipes inside recipes
A menu recipe can use a prep recipe as an ingredient, and prep recipes can use other prep recipes. A vanilla latte might be espresso + milk + vanilla syrup, where the syrup is itself a prep recipe of sugar, water, and vanilla. Costs roll up through every layer. When the price of sugar goes up, the syrup’s cost updates, and every drink that uses the syrup updates too. You never re-cost anything by hand.
Yields: what a batch makes
Every prep recipe has a yield: what one batch produces, like 2 liters of syrup or 24 cookies. The yield is what makes per-serving math work: if a batch costs $9.60 and yields 2 L, the app knows syrup costs $0.48 per 100 mL, so a 20 mL pump costs about 10¢. If you scale a batch up or down, the per-unit cost stays honest.
Units in recipes
Recipe ingredients are measured in real kitchen units: grams, ounces, milliliters, fluid ounces, each. The app only offers units it can actually convert for that item (based on the item’s pack size and units), and it checks again when you save, so you can’t accidentally build a recipe whose cost can’t be calculated. Packaging-style units like "case" aren’t used inside recipes; countable things are measured as "each."
Who sees costs
Staff can open recipes and see ingredients and quantities (useful as a build sheet behind the bar), but cost figures are hidden from staff entirely. Managers and admins see full costing. More in Your team and roles.
Where recipe costs show up
- On each recipe: total batch cost and per-yield cost.
- In food cost reports: recipes power your theoretical food cost.
- With Square connected: each sale is costed using the recipe mapped to that menu item, so you can see what every drink and dish should have cost you.