Almost every kitchen has recipe costing cards — escandallos, as they are called in Spanish kitchens. The problem is the date on them: they were drawn up when the menu was put together and nobody has opened them since. Meanwhile, olive oil has changed price, the fish supplier has raised its rates and the side portion has grown a little every week. The card still says the dish runs at 29%, and it no longer does.

This guide covers what a costing card is, which fields it needs, how to build one step by step and, above all, how to keep it current when suppliers put prices up — which is where margin is really lost.

What a recipe costing card is and which fields it needs

A recipe costing card is the cost sheet of a dish: every ingredient, in what quantity, at what price and how much it contributes to the cost of the portion. It does two jobs: it tells you what each dish costs (and therefore its food cost and margin), and it makes the kitchen serve the same portion every time.

To be useful, every line needs:

Ingredient and purchase format (5 kg box, 5 l drum, unit).
Purchase price per kilo, litre or unit.
Yield or waste: what share of what you bought reaches the plate after trimming, peeling or filleting.
Net quantity per portion: what goes on the plate.
Gross quantity: what leaves the store room to get that net quantity (net ÷ yield).
Line cost.

And at the foot of the card: total portion cost, selling price excluding VAT, food cost (%) and gross margin in euros.

If you work with base preparations — a stock, a sauce, a dough — cost them on their own card and use their cost per kilo or per litre as if they were one more ingredient. That way, when cream goes up, you do not have to redo every dish that uses the sauce: you only update the sauce’s card.

How to build a costing card step by step

Weigh the real portion, not the one the recipe says from memory. Plate three or four during a normal service and take the average.
Take the purchase price from the latest delivery note, not from the supplier’s price list or from what you remember.
Measure the yield of anything that gets trimmed: weigh it gross, trim it, weigh it net. Do it a couple of times, because it varies by piece and by supplier.
Work out the cost of each line from the price per net kilo (purchase price ÷ yield) and add everything up, including bread, side, sauce and finishing oil.
Divide by the menu price excluding VAT to get the food cost.

For the calculation worked through on an example dish, see food cost per dish: how to calculate it and how to set the menu price. And to avoid starting from scratch, the recipe costing template in Excel is free, needs no sign-up, and already has the ingredients sheet, the recipe sheet with waste and the per-dish summary with food cost and margin.

How to keep the costing card current when suppliers raise prices

A costing card is a snapshot. The trouble is that prices move more often than menus do. Three decisions keep the snapshot from going stale.

1. Decide which price you use: the latest or the weighted average

When a more expensive delivery arrives, your cold room holds stock bought at two different prices. Illustrative example (made-up figures to show the calculation): there are 4 kg of beef tenderloin bought at €22.00/kg left and 6 kg at €25.00/kg come in.

Weighted average cost = (4 × 22.00 + 6 × 25.00) / 10 = €23.80/kg

With 25% trimming waste and a 200 g net portion, the meat in the same dish costs:

Price used	€/kg net	Portion cost
Old price (€22.00/kg)	€29.33	€5.87
Weighted average cost (€23.80/kg)	€31.73	€6.35
Latest price (€25.00/kg)	€33.33	€6.67

The weighted average cost reflects what the stock you hold actually cost you, so it is the right one for measuring the margin on what you are selling: one expensive delivery does not spike every dish at once, and a cheap one does not paper over a problem. To decide the price on the next menu, though, also look at what you will pay to restock: if the increase is here to stay, the weighted average will end up there.

2. Set rules for re-costing; do not leave it to memory

A few simple rules that work:

When an ingredient that makes up more than 10% of a dish’s cost changes price by more than 5%.
When you change supplier or purchase format (the yield of a whole piece is not that of a pre-portioned one).
When you change the recipe or the portion.
And, at the very least, a full review every quarter.

3. Check the theory against the store room

The costing card says what should be used. A physical count says what has been used. Once a month, count your 10–15 most expensive ingredients and compare them with what sales should have consumed. If stock is missing, the problem is not the price: it is the portion, storage waste or product leaving without being recorded. That figure never shows up on a costing card unless you go looking for it.

How a POS with Stock & Recipes automates it

Everything above can be done in a spreadsheet. The hard part is keeping it up every week with service on top of you. That is exactly the part Bouzon Digital Stock & Recipes handles — the inventory and recipes module of the Bouzon Digital POS:

Purchases come in as delivery notes, with their lines and the total printed on the paper. When you confirm one, each ingredient updates its weighted average cost and the cost of every recipe that uses it is recalculated automatically. If the lines do not add up to the delivery note’s total, it warns you.
Every recipe carries quantities and waste, so the module knows how much leaves the store room gross for each net portion, and it calculates margin on the price excluding VAT.
Every sale draws the recipe’s ingredients out of stock: when the order goes to the kitchen, when it is paid, or manually — your choice.
Waste is recorded with a reason (expired, broken, prep error…) and valued in euros.
Physical counts are done as a count sheet and show the difference in units and in euros between what should be there and what is.

The result is that the costing card stops being a snapshot from the day the menu opened: it is today’s cost, at the prices you actually paid. To run the numbers before deciding anything, try the food cost calculator, and for the big picture (ranges by type of venue and levers to bring cost down), the practical food cost guide.

Want to stop updating costing cards by hand? POS + Stock & Recipes is €49.98/month, no lock-in and no commission on sales. More on Stock & Recipes and on the plans page.

Recipe costing cards: what they are, how to build one and how to keep them current when suppliers put prices up