Additional Products > Inventory > Procedures > Defining and Entering Recipes

To enter the recipes into your system, you should examine what ingredients compose a recipe, and how they are set up with your menu. The section for menu setup and how it relates to these recipes is detailed in a different section, so if you need help analyzing how recipes are related, please see that section.

There are three different types of recipes in the system. The first is a standard recipe, which is used for a majority of the recipes you create. Using the example of a pizzeria, you would create a recipe for each of your pizza sizes for a basic cheese pizza. You would include in the ingredients your sauce, cheese, flour, salt, etc… For each ingredient you input, it will either pull the recipe unit from the inventory item, or it will provide a drop-down box to select a measurement for inventory items marked with a weight to volume conversion. If the item has this conversion, you only need to select how you use it in this particular recipe, and it will convert the volume measurement from the inventory item.

As an example, let’s say you buy salt by the pound, but use it by the teaspoon in a particular recipe. If you have entered the weight to volume conversion for a cup of salt in the inventory entry window, the recipe will figure out the item cost by further converting the cup into teaspoons. When multiplied by the quantity used in the recipe, the final cost of that item is detailed as an extended cost on the recipe window.

For the second type of recipe, a sub-recipe, you’ll only want to select this option for recipes that are created on the fly, and are used as sub-components to other recipes. Examples of this include a 20 oz. soda that includes the cup, lid and straw in the recipe, or a cup of ranch with your salads where you use a custom ranch recipe, and include the cup and lid for the container. The goal of sub-recipes is that they only need to be entered once, but can be used multiple times, and if the base ingredients ever change, it will update the sub-recipe in all recipes that use it.

The third type of recipe is a production recipe. When you create a production recipe, you need to also create a production inventory item. This item is then linked to the recipe in the production item drop-down box on the recipe screen. Once this recipe is linked up, you will use the Production Recipes… link on the left-hand side of the Recipes center to create stock of that item. On production recipes, you will not have a menu price or food cost percentage, but instead have a yield and yield unit. Production items and recipes are used to take base inventory items out of stock and create an item that you will continue to keep on-hand. If you have a custom sauce, dough or dressing recipe, those are perfect examples of what a production recipe is used for.

When creating a production recipe, the yield needs to be in the units you will use in other recipes. For example, if you are creating a sauce recipe and it makes a 5 gallon batch of sauce, you need to make sure you enter 640 and select ounces from the drop-down list for the yield unit. Also, you can type in a custom unit for the yield unit, i.e. you can type in Dough Ball if you have a custom pizza dough recipe. Just note that a production recipe will not do any conversion for you, regardless of what unit you select for your production item. It must be in the recipe units you plan on using it for.

Once this production inventory item is created, you’ll be able to use it in any recipe you need to just like any other inventory item.