1pm
Start free trial
← All help articles

Building costed recipes

costinginvoicingevents
Building costed recipes

A recipe turns a list of ingredients into a cost. You tell 1pm what one batch makes, its yield, and add the ingredient lines. It totals the cost and divides by the yield to give you a cost per serving. Because the math reads live off your ingredient prices, a recipe re-costs itself the moment a supplier price changes, with no re-entry.

This article covers creating a recipe, adding its lines, reading the cost, reusing prep recipes inside other recipes, scaling to a guest count, and the food cost helper. It assumes you have already added a few costed ingredients.

Creating a recipe

Open Recipes in the sidebar and click New recipe. Give it a name and a Yield, which is the single most important field on the page, so it is worth a moment.

Yield is how much one batch of the finished recipe makes, and 1pm divides the total cost by it to get the cost per serving. It comes in two shapes:

  • each (serves N) for something you plate and count. A beef ragù that serves 8 has a yield of 8 each.
  • a batch unit (kg, L and the rest) for something you make in bulk and portion later. A dressing you make two liters at a time has a yield of 2 L.

The last option is the prep recipe checkbox, for a sauce, stock or spice mix you make once and use inside other recipes. More on that below. Click Create & build and you land in the recipe builder.

Adding ingredient lines

The builder lists your ingredient lines under Ingredients, with columns for the ingredient, quantity, unit, an optional note, and the line cost. Each line has a picker offering two groups: Ingredients (everything in your library) and Prep recipes (any sub-recipes you can nest here).

Pick a component, type a quantity, and choose a unit. You can use any unit in the same family as the ingredient, and 1pm converts: an oil you bought by the liter can go in as 80 ml. The cost cell fills in straight away, showing the line cost and, beneath it, the per-unit rate so you can sanity-check quantity times rate against a price you know. Lines save as you change them, and you can drag them into any order.

Reading the cost

The Cost card on the right keeps a running total:

  • Total batch, the sum of every costable line.
  • Per serving (or per L, per kg, whatever your yield unit is), the total divided by the yield.

If a line cannot be costed, the total simply leaves it out and the card tells you how many lines it excluded, so a half-finished recipe never quietly under-reports.

When a line will not cost

A small warning triangle in the cost column means 1pm could not put a number on that line. Hover it for the specific reason. It is almost always one of:

  • No ingredient or prep recipe chosen yet.
  • The ingredient has no price set. Add one on the Ingredients page.
  • The line uses a different family from how the ingredient is bought, and there is no bridge. Set a density or a per-each weight or volume on the ingredient.
  • A nested prep recipe is not costed yet, or its yield unit does not match the line's unit.

Fix the cause and the line costs itself. Nothing here ever silently falls back to zero.

Prep recipes: make it once, use it everywhere

Mark a recipe as a prep recipe and it stops being a dish in its own right and becomes a building block. A demi-glace, a house spice mix, a pastry: make it once, cost it once, and it appears under Prep recipes in every other recipe's picker.

When you drop a prep recipe into another recipe, its per-yield cost flows straight in. A demi-glace that yields 1 L and costs $8.00 to make is $8.00 per liter, so using 200 ml of it in a sauce adds $1.60. You can nest prep recipes several layers deep. 1pm blocks a recipe from ever containing itself, directly or through a loop, so the costing cannot run away.

Scaling to a guest count

The Scale card takes a recipe built for one batch and works out the shopping and the cost for another. It reminds you what the recipe currently makes, then you enter a target in Scale to and click Scale. 1pm lays out every ingredient at the new quantity with its scaled cost, and a new total at the foot. A recipe for 10 scaled to 120 multiplies every line by twelve. It doubles as a production sheet for the kitchen.

Trying a sell price

Under the cost, If you sold this at, per serving is a scratchpad for the number most kitchens actually watch. Type a price and 1pm shows the food cost as a percentage and the margin in cash. Food cost percentage is simply the plate cost divided by what you charge, so a $2.02 plate sold at $26 runs a food cost of 7.8% and leaves $23.98 of margin. Nothing here is saved. It is a quick "what if" while you set your prices.

Related articles