Recipe costing software that keeps up with your invoices

A recipe spreadsheet can be useful when a single person maintains a small menu. The work becomes harder when a supplier changes a case size, the chef changes a portion, and the manager updates a different copy of the file. A formula can be correct while the price it references is weeks out of date. That produces confident answers to the wrong question.

Recipe costing software should keep the purchasing record connected to the recipe. In BOH Brain, the ingredient catalog supplies the unit costs used by your recipes. You still define the actual dish: ingredients, quantities, preparation components, and selling price. The benefit is that a price update can flow through the recipes that depend on that ingredient, without editing the same number in several places.

Upload a supplier PDF, image, or CSV, then review the extracted lines. Confirm the product match, total purchase price, and pack structure before approval. For example, four five-pound bags contain twenty pounds, not four pounds. Treating that case as four units of recipe weight would distort every dish using the product.

After approval, ingredient costs update and affected recipes recalculate. Manual ingredient price changes also trigger recipe recalculation. The process does not choose a new menu price for you. It gives you current costs so that changing a portion, replacing an ingredient, or adjusting a selling price becomes a deliberate decision. Review anything unusual on the invoice before it reaches your catalog.

A sauce, stock, syrup, or dressing has its own ingredients and usable yield. Cost the whole batch, enter the amount it actually produces, and use that batch inside the finished recipe. If a dressing batch costs $24 and produces three liters, a 50 ml portion costs $0.40. The useful denominator is the finished usable yield, not the starting volume before reduction.

BOH Brain supports prep recipes used in finished dishes. When an ingredient cost changes, the affected prep cost and dependent dish costs can update together. Keep yields realistic and review them when a preparation method changes. Software cannot know that a new pan, different trim, or longer reduction changed your actual output unless the recipe is updated.

Purchasing and cooking rarely use the same units. You might buy flour in a kilogram bag, portion it in grams, and count unopened bags during inventory. A bottle of oil may arrive in liters while a recipe uses milliliters. Define the purchase structure first, then choose a recipe unit that makes the ingredient easy to portion.

Weight and volume are different measurements. A fluid ounce of oil is not automatically a weight ounce of oil, and a cup of flour needs an ingredient-specific weight if you intend to cost it by grams. BOH Brain's conversion engine keeps weight and volume separate. Correct units matter more than the number of decimal places shown on a cost card.

Food cost percentage is ingredient cost divided by selling price, multiplied by 100. A $4.50 dish sold for $18 has a 25% food cost. Its $13.50 difference is contribution before labor, rent, payment fees, and other expenses. Calling that difference net profit would hide the rest of the operating costs.

Set targets that fit the category and review exceptions. An expensive entree may have a higher food cost percentage yet contribute more dollars than a low-priced side. Prioritize items that sell frequently and have meaningful cost changes. Targets help direct attention; they should not force every item into the same price formula without considering demand and the rest of the menu.

Begin with a few dishes that share ingredients and one prep recipe. Approve a recent invoice, check the pack sizes against the actual labels, and compare the resulting recipe costs to a manual calculation. Have the cook who portions the dish review the quantities. This gives you a repeatable setup process before you build the full menu.

The Free plan includes the ingredient and recipe catalog and five AI-parsed invoices per month. Pro is $75 per month and adds unlimited AI invoice parsing plus the pricing workspace and deeper reports. Consult the plan comparison for current limits and invoice retention. Test the core workflow with your own products before choosing an upgrade.