Recipes and costing

Recipes turn your item costs into menu costs. Build a recipe once and the app keeps its cost up to date forever — every time an ingredient’s price changes, every recipe that uses it is recalculated automatically.

Two kinds of recipe

• Prep recipes are things you make in batches and use as ingredients in other recipes: cold brew concentrate, vanilla syrup, house dressing, cookie dough.
• Menu recipes are what you actually sell: a latte, a sandwich, a slice of cake.

Nesting: recipes inside recipes

A menu recipe can use a prep recipe as an ingredient, and prep recipes can use other prep recipes. A vanilla latte might be espresso + milk + vanilla syrup, where the syrup is itself a prep recipe of sugar, water, and vanilla. Costs roll up through every layer — when the price of sugar goes up, the syrup’s cost updates, and every drink that uses the syrup updates too. You never re-cost anything by hand.

Yields: what a batch makes

Every prep recipe has a yield — what one batch produces, like “2 liters of syrup” or “24 cookies.” The yield is what makes per-serving math work: if a batch costs $9.60 and yields 2 L, the app knows syrup costs $0.48 per 100 mL, so a 20 mL pump costs about 10¢. If you scale a batch up or down, the per-unit cost stays honest.

Units in recipes

Recipe ingredients are measured in real kitchen units — grams, ounces, milliliters, fluid ounces, each. The app only offers units it can actually convert for that item (based on the item’s pack size and units), and it checks again when you save — so you can’t accidentally build a recipe whose cost can’t be calculated. Packaging-style units like “case” aren’t used inside recipes; countable things are measured as “each.”

Who sees costs

Staff can open recipes and see ingredients and quantities — useful as a build sheet behind the bar — but cost figures are hidden from staff entirely. Managers and admins see full costing. More in Your team and roles.

Where recipe costs show up

• On each recipe: total batch cost and per-yield cost.
• In food cost reports: recipes power your theoretical food cost.
• With Square connected: each sale is costed using the recipe mapped to that menu item, so you can see what every drink and dish should have cost you.