Know your food cost. Down to the gram.
Raw materials tracked. Stock auto-deducted on every sale. Food cost % calculated live. Low-stock alerts before service starts. Never run out. Never guess your margins.
Full inventory control
Raw Material Tracking
Track every ingredient by weight, unit, supplier, and current stock level — updated automatically on every sale. No more manual spreadsheets or end-of-night stock counts. Every item in your kitchen has a live number attached to it at all times.
Auto-Deduction on Sale
Sell a Zinger Burger and the system auto-deducts chicken, bun, sauce, and cheese from inventory based on your defined recipe. This means your stock levels are always accurate without any manual intervention. You always know what's left without walking to the kitchen.
Real-Time Food Cost %
Know your exact food cost percentage on every menu item and category, calculated live from actual ingredient costs and current supplier prices. Stop guessing your margins and start making menu pricing decisions based on real numbers that update as supplier costs change.
Low Stock Alerts
Set minimum stock levels per ingredient and receive WhatsApp and dashboard alerts before you run out mid-service. Alerts fire with enough lead time to place an order before the next rush — preventing the '86' moment that loses you customers and revenue.
Waste Tracking
Log spoilage and waste with a reason code and see waste trends week over week. Know whether your ordering quantity needs to be adjusted, or whether a specific prep process is generating unnecessary losses. Most restaurants reduce food waste 15–25% within the first month.
Supplier & Purchase Orders
Log purchase orders per supplier and track delivery, price variance, and total spend per vendor every month. When a supplier raises prices, you see it immediately against historical data and can renegotiate or switch with confidence.
Consumption Reports
Weekly reports show which ingredients are consumed most, which menu items have drifting food costs, and where margins are thinning across your menu. This gives you the data to adjust portion sizes, switch suppliers, or reprice before profit erodes silently.
Recipe-Based Costing
Link recipes to menu items so that changing a supplier price automatically recalculates the cost and margin of every dish that ingredient touches. You always know what your real profitability is — and you get an alert when a dish crosses your margin threshold.
What food cost % actually means
The number on your dashboard isn't abstract — here's the arithmetic underneath it, and what it does and doesn't tell you.
A 34% plate, itemized
Take a chicken biryani sold at Rs. 550. Recipe-based costing breaks the plate down to the ingredient level: rice at Rs. 35, chicken at Rs. 95, ghee and oil at Rs. 20, masala and whole spices at Rs. 15, and garnish — fried onion, raita, salad — at Rs. 20. Add it up and the plate costs Rs. 185 to put on the table.
The formula is always the same: ingredient cost ÷ menu price. Rs. 185 ÷ Rs. 550 works out to 33.6% — call it a 34% food cost on that dish, and now it's a number you can defend instead of a guess you round to.
Where should that number sit?
As a general rule of thumb, most operators aim to keep food cost somewhere between 28% and 35% of menu price. Where exactly you should sit inside that range depends on your format, not a fixed target: a QSR running high volume on simple prep can comfortably run lower, while fine dining with premium ingredients and lower table turnover often runs higher and still be a healthy, well-run kitchen. The point of tracking it isn't to hit one magic percentage — it's to know your real number per dish, and to notice the moment it drifts.
Wastage or theft? The variance report doesn't say — it points
Every dish you sell has a theoretical ingredient usage, calculated from its recipe. Your actual stock movement is a separate, physical number — what left the storeroom. The daily variance between the two is where both wastage and kitchen pilferage first show up, days or weeks before a full stock count would ever catch it. The report itself doesn't tell you which one it is — over-portioning, spoilage, or someone walking out with product — it tells you exactly where to look, and on which shift. For the mechanics of turning that variance into an actual investigation, see how restaurant owners in Pakistan actually catch staff theft.
Where the spreadsheet stops working
Excel genuinely works for inventory — for a while. It holds up fine for a single kitchen with one person updating it. It starts to strain the moment more than one person needs to update it daily: a second branch, a supplier price list with dozens of SKUs, or recipe-level costing across a full menu. Past that point, someone is always working from a version that's a shift behind the kitchen — a price that changed yesterday, a stock count from last night, a recipe someone tweaked and forgot to update in the master file. The sheet isn't wrong on purpose. It's just structurally one step behind the moment more than one person touches it.
Works best with
These features are commonly used alongside Inventory & Costing.
Every POS sale triggers automatic ingredient deduction. No manual stock counts at end of shift — POS and inventory stay in perfect sync in real time.
Recipes are linked to menu items so that any ingredient price change instantly recalculates food cost and margin for every dish that uses that ingredient.
Inventory purchase orders feed into your cost records, giving your accountant and tax filings an accurate picture of COGS alongside your sales tax obligations.
Explore Solutions
See how Inventory & Costing fits into a complete restaurant setup.
Cloud kitchens run on tight margins with high ingredient throughput. Real-time costing and auto-deduction make it possible to know your profitability per order without a full-time accountant.
Fine dining requires precise portioning and expensive ingredients. Recipe-based costing and per-dish margin tracking ensure your high-cost items are always priced to protect profitability.
Common questions
Stop losing money you can't see
Inventory + food costing live in 48 hours. Setup and recipe upload included.