Overview: Recipe Costing in My Recipe Manager

Note:please ensure that you have read this article before continuing with any recipe costing.

When we first released My Recipe Manager there was very little interest in recipe costing, however a couple of schools have asked about the possibility of recipe costing as well as other schools that have been interested in subscribing to My Recipe Manager. Even though this interest has come from a handful of schools we decided to investigate this functionality further as the addition of recipe costing in My Recipe Manager may, in the long term, benefit our existing subscribers as well as future subscribers by giving them additional functionality and more choice.

With recipe costing we had several goals that we wanted to achieve:

1. To integrate recipe costing into My Recipe Manager so that there was no need for a school to create, maintain or duplicate information in a separate spreadsheet or word document.
2. To integrate recipe costing into My Recipe Manager with little or no impact to current subscribers (schools) i.e. if a school didn't want to use recipe costing then they could continue using My Recipe Manager as if nothing had changed.
3. To make recipe costing simple, quick and easy to use but still deliver something which was both professional and accurate*.
4. The ability for a teacher to cost an ingredient once regardless of how many recipes the ingredient was used in i.e. not having to cost an ingredient every time you added it to a recipe.
5. To provide schools with the ability to manage and control their own ingredient costings as the cost of ingredients can vary from school to school, state to state and region to region.

After nine months of development, testing and refining we were finally able to achieve our goals and added recipe costing into My Recipe Manager.

How Does Recipe Costing Work

To use the recipe costing feature in My Recipe Manager you need to:

1. Identify each recipe that you want to track as a 'costed recipe' then cost each of the ingredients for that recipe. To read the topic on how to do this click here.
2. Once you have costed the recipe's ingredients simply add the recipe to your list of 'Costed Recipes'. To read the topic on how to do this click here.
3. Maintain the cost of your costed recipes by keeping the cost of your ingredients up to date. To read the topic on how to do this click here.

Costed recipes can then be viewed via two dedicated reports. To read the topic on how to do this click here.

Note: * accuracy of recipe costing depends on you keeping the cost of your ingredients up to date.

Hint: in order for recipe costing to be as accurate as possible we strongly recommend that you assign a teacher at your school the responsibility of costing your ingredients as well as maintaining those costs and on a regular basis.